UVA School of Medicine

Fall 2021 13 Biomedical engineer Richard Price, PhD '95, another co-director of the center, is exploring other applications for the perturbation effects of FUS. His lab has demonstrated that activating microbubbles with lower intensity focused ultrasound can temporarily disrupt the permeability of blood vessels, cell membranes, and the blood-brain barrier, allowing immune therapies and other treatments to be delivered directly to areas of pathology, including tumors. This team is also working on using FUS perturbation to allow delivery of nano particles into the brain and to tumors in other areas of the body. Focused Ultrasound Foundation: Investing in Tangible Results U VA's Focused Ultrasound Cancer Immunotherapy Center is the result of collaborations beyond researchers at the university. The Charlottesville-based Focused Ultrasound Foundation has been a critical partner in funding the Center and attracting additional investments from the Commonwealth of Virginia and the University of Virginia. "Most of what's been done here wouldn't have happened without the Focused Ultrasound Foundation," says Craig Slingluff, MD, co- director of the center. "They've been great about actively promoting focused ultrasound and supporting novel ways to use it." The foundation, under the leadership of former UVA neurosurgeon Neal F. Kassell, MD, was created in 2006 to accelerate the development of focused ultrasound technologies that show promise for improving patient outcomes in a variety of clinical areas. The foundation has always had a strong connection with UVA, funding projects in neurosurgery, radiology, cancer treatment, and biomedical engineering. It also helped establish UVA's clinical Focused Ultrasound Center and provided funding for the world's first clinical trials leading to FDA approval for the use of focused ultrasound to treat essential tremor. "Our funding comes from philanthropists who feel strongly about funding projects that produce tangible results," says Jessica Foley, PhD, chief scientific officer for the Focused Ultrasound Foundation. "We seek to use the technology to address unmet clinical needs and ultimately want to fund projects that will get treatment to patients as quickly as possible. So it is the hard-to-treat cancers — glioblastoma, pancreatic cancer, certain types of breast cancer — where we feel there is a role for focused ultrasound." UVA has had a strong program in cancer immunology research for many years, and the foundation provided early support for some of the preclinical work pairing focused ultrasound with immunotherapy for cancer treatment. Over the last few years, the surge of success with these projects led the foundation to pursue the development of an established center where collaborations could be formalized and clinical trials could be expanded. "We are incredibly excited about this center," Foley says. "Not only is it going to be beneficial for patients, but it will enable UVA to continue to lead the way in how the combined use of focused ultrasound and immunotherapy is leveraged to treat cancer. Physicians around the world in this field are going to be looking to the research that is coming out of this center to help guide their own programs. This work will have a global impact, which is very exciting." Our biggest hope in all these studies is that by generating a system-wide response we have the exciting potential to control disease throughout the body without having to use such toxic therapies." P A T R I C K D I L L O N , M D , R E S ' 0 7 M E D I C A L O N C O L O G I S T

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