New $16 million center to push, pinch and probe cancer cells & tissues

BERKELEY — The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has awarded the University of California, Berkeley, $15.7 million over five years to allow physical scientists and engineers to open a new front in the war on cancer. UC Berkeley's Physical Sciences-Oncology Center, a collaboration with UC San Francisco (UCSF), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and San Francisco's Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center, is one of 12 centers announced today (Monday, Oct. 26) by the NCI "to bring new perspectives to the mechanisms of cancer," according to the institute's Web site. "In our center, scientists from across the physical sciences, including chemists, engineers, physicists and mathematicians, will work side-by-side with experienced biologists and oncologists," said biophysicist Jan Liphardt, UC Berkeley associate professor of physics and principal investigator of the center. "Together, these teams will apply the tools and insights of the physical sciences to oncology." Overall, the network of physical sciences-oncology centers will receive $22.7 million from the NCI in fiscal year 2009, and will focus on physical laws and principles of cancer; evolution and evolutionary theory of cancer; information coding, decoding, transfer and translation in cancer; and ways to de-convolute cancer's complexity.