Congratulations to Drs. Steffen Sammet and Daniel Ginat on being selected to receive funding from the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center (UCCCC). The $50,000 in funding, awarded through the Janet D. Rowley Discovery Fund, will support their project entitled “MR Thermography-Guided Interstitial Laser Ablation in the Head and Neck in-vivo”.
Drs. Sammet’s and Ginat’s project proposes MR-guided laser ablation as a minimally invasive technique for safely treating head and neck cancers with real-time temperature monitoring in cases that are not amenable to other therapies. Over a one-year period, laser ablation of tissues in the head and neck region of animals in-vivo will be performed at the University of Chicago MRI Research Center. The ablated tissues will be harvested for pathological assessment and comparison with the MR thermography images. Once this technique has been validated in the animal model, they will use the investigational device exemption (IDE) that they have submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to perform clinical trials with laser ablation of head and neck cancers in patients at the University of Chicago.
