{"id":129802,"date":"2024-02-05T10:13:19","date_gmt":"2024-02-05T16:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/?p=129802"},"modified":"2024-02-05T10:13:19","modified_gmt":"2024-02-05T16:13:19","slug":"uwm-scientist-lands-542000-nsf-award-for-modeling-virtual-tumor-tissues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/news\/uwm-scientist-lands-542000-nsf-award-for-modeling-virtual-tumor-tissues\/","title":{"rendered":"51ÁÔÆæ scientist lands $542,000 NSF award for modeling virtual tumor tissues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mahsa Dabagh, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development award by the National Science Foundation to build a virtual model of a human tumor that can reveal biomarkers of cancer formation and stage, and also predict the likelihood of it spreading.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Malignant tumors develop in a cellular soup that can contribute to the disease\u2019s progression, said Dabagh, an assistant professor in 51ÁÔÆæ\u2019s College of Engineering &amp; Applied Science. She specializes in computational modeling of how cells and organelles inside of cells sense and respond to changes in their surroundings.<\/p>\n<p>Dabagh will use the five-year, $542,000 grant (often called the CAREER award) to construct a model of aprevalent type of pancreatic tumor, known as pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. She will look for changes that occur in tissue on a molecular level.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Patients with pancreatic cancer often don\u2019t have physical symptoms, like pain, until the disease in its late stages or has spread to other places in the body.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cIf we understand the cellular mechanisms of malignancy, and we track those, then we are in a good place for prevention and treatment,\u201d Dabagh said. \u201cI believe this model will be very helpful in increasing earlier and more accurate cancer diagnoses.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>CAREER awards are the NSF\u2019s most prestigious grants for early career researchers. They support the professional development of teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of this century.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nsf.gov\/awardsearch\/showAward?AWD_ID=2340149&amp;HistoricalAwards=false\">For this project<\/a>, she will take a comparative approach, characterizing healthy tissue and diseased tissue to find the differences.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cCancer cells move around to find the best place to grow,\u201d Dabagh said. \u201cOnce we have a view of the changing composition, then we work backwards to find the biomarkers.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Using atomic force microscopy to measure molecular forces in 3D, Dabagh and her lab members will determine biomechanical properties of different tissues and then feed that into the computational model. With cancer, for example, different levels of tissue stiffness signal malignancy or progressive malignancy, she said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u201cWe would also look for a vascular network starting to form around the tissue because blood vessels are needed for cancer to grow,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Another feature the team will track is the level of collagen fiber, a common fibrous protein in the body that provides structure to tissues. With pancreatic cancer, collagen fiber builds up, forming a thick layer of scar tissue around the tumor and blocking drugs from reaching the cancer cells.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">A unique aspect of the model is that it can be personalized for individual patients by using their particular biological data.<\/p>\n<p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Because the model will replicate the complexity and heterogeneity of a real human tumor, it could also be modified to use in revealing the progression of other diseases, such as atherosclerotic cardiovascular diseases, healing of chronic wounds and the spread of viruses. It also has promise as a platform to safely evaluate new drugs and treatments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mahsa Dabagh, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development award by the National Science Foundation to build a virtual model of a human tumor that can reveal biomarkers of cancer formation and stage, and also predict the likelihood of it spreading. Malignant tumors develop in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40008,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"section":[],"display_categories":[],"related-coverage":[],"uwmnews-feed":[],"class_list":["post-129802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-releases"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v27.3 (Yoast SEO v27.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>51ÁÔÆæ scientist lands $542,000 NSF award for modeling virtual tumor tissues<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Mahsa Dabagh, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development award by the National\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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