Interventional Oncology Bioengineering Lab Interventional Radiology • City of Hope Cancer Center

Our lab is developing the next generation of minimally invasive cancer therapies, with a focus on new devices and materials for intratumoral drug delivery. These new technologies will allow us to:

• Treat tumors in the liver, lung, pancreas, and kidney
• Improve tumor targeting (improved efficacy and reduced side effects)
• Improve local drug release kinetics (single treatment instead of multiple treatments)
• Perform local immunotherapy / in situ cancer vaccination
• Deliver the right drug, to the right place, at the right time

Technologies and projects

An intratumoral infusion port catheter enables direct infusion of immunotherapy agents into tumors, using arbitrary dosing schedules. The catheter has barbed sideholes, modeled after the barbs in a bee stinger. The barbs maintain the catheter position in the liver tumor, despite respiratory motion. High resistance side holes within the barbs regulate fluid flow, improving uniformity of drug infusion into tumor. 183x improvement in local drug delivery.

Injectable gel for percutaneous or intra-arterial drug delivery	Immunogenic embolic to induce anti-tumor immune response and abscopal effect	Drug-eluting glue and tumor-targeting drug carriers	First lung chemoembolization trial in the United States
Micro CT of liver tumor arteries	Drug release kinetics	Pancreatic cancer angiography and drug delivery	Better intratumoral delivery translates into better overall survival

Join our lab

News

5/28/2024: Imran Shair Mohammad received a grant from Society of Interventional Radiology on Intra-arterial therapeutics to reverse osteoarthritis.

4/28/2023: Our phase II trial of lung chemoembolization is open for enrollment. Trial overview | Protocol | clinicaltrials.gov

6/14/2022: Our paper on the Oncopig model of liver cancer won the JVIR Editor's Award for Outstanding Laboratory Investigation.

8/31/2021: Our lung chemoembolization paper was published in Radiology.

11/30/2020: Our local immunotherapy proposal won "best pitch" at The Academy Imaging Shark Tank (RSNA)