ARPA-H project to pioneer rapid manufacturing of tumor models

Advanced imaging and AI will power the manufacture of any cancer at the push of a button.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) has announced a major new project to be led by Bill King of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The goal of the $21 million project is to develop a radically new platform to manufacture tumor models and dramatically expand their availability for both medical research and personalized medicine.

King, who is the Ralph A. Andersen Endowed Chair in Mechanical Science & Engineering, a member of the Cancer Center at Illinois, and a professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, says that the project “will create a fundamentally new manufacturing technology that uses artificial intelligence, robotics, and vision systems to monitor and control the growth of tumor models.”

Tumor models are used to study cancer and test potential treatments. Most tumor models are two-dimensional cultures grown on flat surfaces. Three-dimensional tumor models, grown in a gel medium, are superior to two-dimensional cultures because they more closely resemble the behavior of cancer in humans. Unfortunately, 3D models are available for only a few cancers and are difficult to grow. Such problems have been a barrier to their widespread adoption for research—for example, on drug development—and for other purposes.

The Illinois team will create an automated production platform that can quickly manufacture 3D tumor models. The researchers will use advanced imaging technology to monitor the tumors while they grow. An AI “brain” will interpret the images and use the information to intelligently direct the tumor model growth conditions. 

“We will integrate advanced chemical imaging technology with the manufacturing platform, and the chemical images will feed AI tools that will help us to understand tumor behavior,” said co-PI Rohit Bhargava, who is a Grainger Distinguished Chair in the Department of Bioengineering and Director of the Cancer Center at Illinois.

The use of combined real-time sensing and AI to take actions should make it possible to reconfigure the system rapidly for new types of cancer. Thus, the system is expected to provide consistent and repeatable production of 3D tumor models of any cancer type. The technology should therefore enable the scalable manufacturing of, for example, cancers from individual patients, cancers prevalent in underserved and minority communities, or rare cancers for which there is little hope of finding a cure.

“This is a flagship project that will allow our university to make a real impact on cancer research and medicine,” said Rashid Bashir, Dean of the Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois. “We are delighted to have the opportunity to drive research excellence and innovation at the intersection of manufacturing science and engineering for medicine.”

ARPA-H was founded in 2022 as an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services with the mission to accelerate better health outcomes for everyone by supporting the development of high-impact solutions to society’s most challenging health problems. 

The Illinois team consists of King, Bhargava, Kannanganattu V. Prasanth (Horwitz Scholar and professor of Cell & Developmental Biology) and Minh N. Do (Thomas and Margaret Huang Endowed Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Lab). All are members of the Cancer Center at Illinois. The project will be based in the Cancer Center’s Tumor Engineering and Phenotyping Shared Resource, which is located in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

The Illinois team will partner with Edison T. Liu, a Professor, President Emeritus, and Honorary Fellow at The Jackson Laboratory, an independent, nonprofit biomedical research institution with a National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center and one of the world’s largest providers of animal tumor models.  

A second ARPA-H award led by Grainger College of Engineering faculty has just been announced as well. That project, led by Stephen Boppart (a professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Bioengineering and the director of the Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute at Illinois), will combine optical imaging technologies with AI screening tools to ensure, in real time, that tumor tissue and cells are completely removed during surgery.

To reach Prof. Bill King, email wpk@illinois.edu

To reach Prof. Rohit Bhargava, email rxb@illinois.edu