Some cancers have a long and deadly memory. Years or decades after the disease has been beaten into remission, cancer cells that weren’t killed by initial treatment may be lying dormant at metastatic sites, like the bone marrow, until they reawaken with malignant intent.

Gabe Kwong wants to build living sentinels to detect those dormant and potentially deadly disseminated tumor cells (DTCs) before the cancer can recur. It’s an ambitious and groundbreaking idea from a researcher whose lab has developed a reputation for innovative work, and it’s earned Kwong a 2022 Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

“I’m extremely humbled, and grateful for what this means for the lab,” said Kwong, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This is a peer-reviewed honor, and it tells us that the field recognizes that our work over the past 10 years has been impactful and worth investing in.”

The Pioneer Awards support highly creative researchers with potentially transformative ideas. The largest grant in the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award will provide Kwong $5.5 million over the next five years. This is the first time a Georgia Tech or Emory research has received funding through the program. And it’s Kwong’s second high-risk project funded: He won the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award for early career scientists in 2016.

According to the NIH, proposed pioneering work must be high-impact and “reflect ideas that are substantially different” from the researcher’s current program.  Kwong’s lab has been focused on engineering synthetic sensors until now. With this project, he’s shifting to reengineering living cells.

“For years, we’ve been designing ultra-sensitive sensors to detect cancer or the response to immunotherapy drugs. They function as sentinels and report on sites of disease by producing a signal that can be detected from a biofluid such as urine,” he said. “They’ve been inorganic probes that don’t have a memory or know how to think. Our goal is to develop a living sensor — immune cells that can traffic through the body and act as a long-lived pool of sentinels.”

Kwong is driven by the potential threat of cancer dormancy. Many cells leave the primary tumor and enter the body’s circulation. Called circulation tumor cells, or CTCs, they are typically short-lived and don’t lead to metastasis. Sometimes, however, a few of these cells may find their way to a distant organ and hide there, despite seemingly successful cancer treatment. These cells can wait for years, or even decades, before reawakening. So, patients with no evidence of disease could harbor dormant cancer and remain at risk of metastatic relapse for the rest of their lives.

“Currently, there is no good way to monitor these dormant cells or their reawakening,” Kwong said. “But we are living in an entirely new era of medicine and cancer immunotherapy where we can design T cells as living medicines. We see this as an opportunity to not only build a future where immune cells are engineered as therapies, but also as living sensors.”

The idea is to use the same T cells that are grafted into a patient as cancer-fighters as lifelong sensors that are continuously on the lookout for future disease. If Kwong and his team are successful, he said the technological breakthroughs could lead to new about how and when dormant cells reawaken.

“Once we figure out how to engineer these cells, we’ll likely transition to a phase where we’re talking more about earlier detection and preventative medicine,” he said. “Our new drugs are already working much, much better than before. Imagine if we can keep the cancer from coming back for years and years and intervene at the earliest stages of recurrence. That’s the high reward.”

For individuals suffering from hearing loss, good news may be on the horizon thanks to cutting-edge optical technology. The French National Research Agency (ANR) has awarded Abdallah Ougazzaden, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and president of Georgia Tech-Lorraine, a €560,000 ($560,700) grant to develop technology for a new class of cochlear implants that may be able to restore hearing for patients.

The project aims to create optically stimulated, reduced-size, high-density cochlear implants with removable LEDs (CORTIORGAN). Project collaborators include Jean-Paul Salvestrini, director of the Georgia Tech-CNRS IRL 2958 lab and adjunct lecturer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE); Paul Voss, associate professor in ECE; and Suresh Sundaram, adjunct lecturer in ECE.

“CORTIORGAN is taking the technology for cochlear implants in a completely new direction through the optical stimulation of the cochlea with compact, dense, and highly flexible LED implants,” Ougazzaden said. “In particular, we will use a new semiconductor material – a two-dimensional hexagonal boron nitride – that brings about a radical rethinking of existing methods for processing inorganic LED devices.”

The key technology is based on optogenetics, a groundbreaking biological technique that stimulates neurons and other cells with light. The technology has a range of medical and neuroscience applications, including sight recovery and blocking pain signals.

The researchers will use optogenetic methods to achieve optical stimulation of auditory nerves rather than traditional electrical stimulation. Because tissue inside the cochlea has high electrical conductivity, optical stimulation of nerves can result in better spatial resolution and thus better implants. 

CORTIORGAN’s goal is to develop removable ultra-thin LEDs that can be packaged in cochlear implants. The novel process allows the researchers to achieve size and flexibility requirements for cochlear implants that will be inserted into mouse cochlea and tested at the end of the project.

“This innovation will have a strong positive impact on the hearing-impaired by offering them an optical implant with greater spatial resolution and higher sound reproduction fidelity in comparison to existing electrical stimulation technology,” Ougazzaden added. “This optical technology will open the door for future neuroscience applications with many opportunities for commercialization.”

Other partners include Institut Pasteur, a renowned Paris-based center for biomedical research, and the Center for Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies (C2N), a collaboration between the University of Paris-Saclay and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Writer: Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor

Image: Georgia-Tech Lorraine

The Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle En­gage­ment Microelectronics Work­force Development program (SCALE) has announced the program will extend another five years and expand with $10.8 million additional Department of Defense (DoD) funding, with a ceiling of $99 million.

SCALE officials said this expansion of the nation’s preeminent program will further its goal to develop a next-generation workforce that can return the United States to prominence in global microelectronics manufacturing.

Georgia Tech participates in the partnership, which is led by Purdue University and managed by NSWC Crane. SCALE facilitates the training of highly skilled U.S. microelectronics engineers, hardware designers and manufacturing experts. SCALE brings together a public-private-academic partnership of 17 universities and 34 partners within the defense industry and government. 

“This is an extremely exciting time in the country and at Tech for microchip design and manufacturing,” said Arijit Raychowdhury, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “These newly announced funds for the SCALE program will help Georgia Tech recruit a new, diverse group of students ready to work in defense microelectronics. We’re thrilled to be a SCALE partner university and honored to be leading many of the project’s specialty areas.”

SCALE provides unique courses, mentoring, internship matching and targeted research projects for college students interested in five microelectronics specialty areas. Georgia Tech ECE faculty members will be the primary investigators for three of the areas: 

• system on a chip will be led by Raychowdhury;
• radiation-hardening will be led by John Cressler;
• and heterogeneous integration/advanced packaging will be led by Madhavan Swaminathan.

The other two focus areas are embedded system security/trusted AI and supply chain awareness.

Industry and government partners regularly meet and update a list of knowledge, skills, and abilities important for new entrants to the workforce. The SCALE universities then update their curriculum to ensure the students are prepared for upcoming needs in the rapidly advancing microelectronics field.

Peter Bermel, SCALE director and the Elmore Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue, said the United States will need 50,000 trained semiconductor engineers to meet overwhelming and rapidly growing demand.

“The United States is committed to expanding and strengthening its semiconductor industry and workforce rapidly over the next five years,” Bermel said. “SCALE takes a holistic approach to the microelectronics workforce gap by comprehensively addressing system challenges for workforce training and recruiting.”

Goals for the next five years include:

• Expanding student participation in SCALE fivefold to more than 1,000.
• Developing learning models for K-12 classrooms.
• Collaborating with community colleges nationwide to develop microelectronics classes.

The demand for microelectronics increased by 26.2% in 2021. But while the United States consumes about half of the chips produced worldwide, the country only manufactures about 12%, highlighting the pressing need for the U.S. to bolster its domestic semiconductor supply chains and industrial capacity.

The funding announcement is the latest highlight in Georgia Tech’s leadership role in bolstering microelectronics and workforce development. Tech’s large engineering and science faculty bring a broad set of research expertise to strengthen the country’s semiconductor capacity. The Institute is uniquely positioned to train the microelectronics workforce, drive future microelectronics advances, and provide fabrication and packaging facilities for industry, academic and government partners to develop and test new solutions.

Mohammadreza (Reza) Zandehshahvar has been awarded a 2022 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in recognition of his research on machine learning for inverse design and knowledge discovery in nanophotonics.

Reza is a Ph.D. candidate in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He has been a member of ECE’s Photonics Research Group, directed by Ali Adibi, the Professor and Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Electronics and Nanophotonics, since 2018.

His current research focuses on developing unsupervised learning models for knowledge discovery in nanophotonics. Other research interests include medical image processing, active learning, and metric learning.

According to SPIE, the key criterion in evaluating and ranking applications for the scholarship is the "prospect for long-term contribution that the granting of an award will make to the field of optics, photonics or related field." This year SPIE has award $293,000 in education scholarships to 78 outstanding SPIE Student Members, based on their potential contribution to optics and photonics, or a related discipline. Award-winning applicants were evaluated, selected, and approved by the SPIE Scholarship Committee. Through 2021, SPIE has distributed over $6 million in individual scholarships.

Earlier this year, Zandehshahvar was awarded the ECE Faculty Award at the School’s annual Roger P. Webb Awards Program. The award is given annually to the electrical or computer engineering student who, in the opinion of the ECE faculty, has done the most to improve the educational environment within ECE or Georgia Tech, and has contributed significantly to both student welfare and student-faculty interactions.

Additionally, he received the 2022 VIP Outstanding Mentor Award for mentoring students on the projects related to machine learning for inverse design in nanophotonics and medical image processing for diagnosis and prognosis of lung diseases. Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program is a transformative approach to enhancing higher education by engaging undergraduate and graduate students in ambitious, long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary project teams that are led by faculty. Reza is the lead mentor on the AI-based Discovery and Innovation VIP team since 2019.