NCI awards $15.2 million to create Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center

Princeton - Princeton - Princeton University physical scientists will partner with researchers at four other institutions to explore the driving forces behind the evolution of cancer under a five-year, $15.2 million award from the National Cancer Institute. The Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center was launched Oct. 26 as one of 12 centers in the institute's new network of Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers. Collaborating with Princeton will be: the University of California-San Francisco; the Johns Hopkins Hospital; the University of California-Santa Cruz; and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif. The center's goal is to understand the explosive evolution of cancer under stress at a deep theoretical and experimental level by leveraging the strengths of an interdisciplinary team of physicists, engineers, chemists, biochemists and oncologists. Using a physics-based approach, the team intends to better grasp the rules or laws that govern how cancer evolves, which may one day inform entirely new treatment approaches. Guillaume Lambert (left), a physics graduate student at Princeton, and Robert Austin, principal investigator of the new Princeton Physical Sciences-Oncology Center and physics professor, observe prostate cancer cells growing on a microhabitat in Jadwin Hall.