Can physicists help get cancer research out of a rut? That’s what the National Cancer Institute is betting on with the roughly $150 million it’s spending over five years on a network of 12 centers, each a multi-institutional, multidisciplinary collaboration led by a physical scientist. “We’re taking cancer, turning it on its side, giving it to a new group of people, and seeing what happens when we combine what we already know with what they come up with,” says Larry Nagahara, NCI program director for the Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers (PS-OCs). The centers got started last fall.
Cancer research hasn’t seen a major paradigm shift in 30 or 40 years, according to William Grady, who studies signal deregulation and epigenetic modifications in gastrointestinal cancer at the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “Most advances involve revisions and refinements. We do not have medical treatments that can cure [most cancers] despite...
