Bioengineering professor Rohit Bhargava, director of the Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) and Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and Dr. Tamara Floyd of OSF HealthCare are using digital pathology to revolutionize liver cancer treatment through the BEAT Cancer Research Initiative. Their project leverages chemical imaging and AI to analyze the chemistry of tissue samples, enabling faster and more accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions, including real-time intraoperative insights. This innovation addresses critical gaps in cancer care, such as identifying metastatic cells during surgery, and bridges Illinois’ research breakthroughs with immediate clinical application.
Written by Chloe Zant
A newly established partnership between the OSF Healthcare Cancer Institute in Peoria, IL and the Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL), called Breakthrough and Advanced Treatment of (BEAT) Cancer Research Initiative, facilitates collaboration to improve cancer diagnostics, treatment, and prevention. CCIL Director Rohit Bhargava, sixth from right, is shown here at the BEAT Cancer kickoff, hosted by the College of Veterinary Medicine.
“New technology should be used to do new things,” says Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) Director Rohit Bhargava, the Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering. This sentiment has guided Bhargava’s research career at Illinois yet is especially apparent in his recent grant-awarded project, in which Bhargava and his team are using digital pathology to analyze liver cancer tissues. Moving forward, this new platform could dramatically reduce the time for a patient to move from diagnosis to treatment, as well as allow for intraoperative decision-making.
Bhargava and Dr. Tamara Floyd from OSF Healthcare developed an idea that is one of five project proposals selected to receive funding for the Breakthrough Engineering and Advanced Treatment of (BEAT) Cancer Research Initiative—a groundbreaking collaboration between the CCIL and clinical scientists from the OSF HealthCare Cancer Institute in Peoria, IL. All awarded grants focus on reducing the time it takes for life-saving cancer research to reach patients in a clinical setting, creating a more direct path from CCIL research to clinical impact.
In Bhargava’s project, researchers are targeting a primary way cancer is diagnosed today, aiming to fast-track decision-making about treatments by elevating the process of pathology—the microscopic examination of cancer tissue. “This is done in a very manual process today,” said Bhargava, regarding the current standard of pathology diagnostics. “The tissue comes out of the organ, we put it on a glass slide, put some dyes on it, and then a person makes a treatment decision. In our lab, however, we have invented a technology called chemical imaging. Instead of measuring how the tissue looks at the microscopic level, we’re going to measure the chemistry of every pixel and then use artificial intelligence to parse that chemistry into clinically actionable information.”
A diagram from the National Cancer Institute depicting how cancer from a tumor can spread into distant tissues. Using Bhargava’s digital pathology technology, surgeons would be able to identify this metastasis as it occurs in step (1), removing lymph nodes (LNs) that are likely cancerous.
Bhargava cites two key uses for this new digital assessment of cancer tissues—faster, more accurate decision-making about treatment directly after diagnosis, as well as intraoperative decision-making, using chemistry to identify exactly where tumor cells have spread throughout the body. “For example, if the tumor has spread outside the organ, it goes to the lymph nodes first,” Bhargava explained. “Using our technology, we can detect not only the tumor in the primary tissue but also tumor cells in the lymph nodes on the spot. This can help the surgeon make a decision about whether the lymph node taken out had any cancer and whether others should be left in.”
What Bhargava describes would remedy a great need in the field of cancer treatment, improving the standard of care and, reducing the risk of not fully removing cancer cells that have spread to other areas outside of a tumor during surgery (metastasis).
“A correct diagnosis, which was the focus of my research in the past, has to connect to better therapy. Either one by itself is not good enough. That’s really what our cancer center will do in collaboration with OSF Healthcare,” says Bhargava, regarding the importance of working in tandem with OSF, who will meet Illinois’ strides in research with near-immediate clinical integration. “This vision of how these two great organizations can work together to address major problems in cancer is transformative.”
Editor’s notes:
Rohit Bhargava is the director of the Cancer Center at Illinois. Bhargava’s primary appointment is as Professor in Bioengineering. He serves as Grainger Distinguished Chair in Engineering as well as a member of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineerinng, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Chemistry. He is also a Professor of Biomedical and Translational Sciences in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine.