Cover Story
BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING FACULTY JULIE SUTCLIFFE AND RANDY CARNEY are making big strides in cancer research. With a combined $6.5 million in new grants from Stand Up to Cancer and the National Institute of Health’s National Cancer Institute, Sutcliffe and Carney are pioneering new technology that will help treat and diagnose cancer earlier and more effectively, saving more lives. “It’s feasible that in our lifetimes, cancer will be a manageable disease, but we need these new technologies to figure out how to do that,” said Carney.
ADVANCING
Cancer Research at UC Davis By Noah Pflueger-Peters
Photo above: Professor Julie Sutcliffe (left) and UC Davis School of Medicine collaborator Rick Bold, M.D. at the UC Davis Comprehensive Center in Sacramento. (Julie Sutcliffe/UC Davis) Photo below: The Carney Lab in 2019. (Randy Carney/UC Davis)
IMAGING TOOLS TO TREAT PANCREATIC CANCER Professor Julie Sutcliffe is using her expertise in cancer imaging and diagnosis to develop a new, effective treatment for pancreatic cancer. After developing a therapeutic from a radioactive imaging tool, her team received $4 million from Stand Up to Cancer to bring their UC Davis-made drug to clinical trials to help patients suffering from the disease. Pancreatic cancer is often asymptomatic until very late stages and the pancreas itself is very dense, making it impossible to deliver drugs directly to the source. The only true treatment is surgically removing part or all of the pancreas, but the surgery can’t be done if the cancer has spread—or metastasized—to other parts of the body. The goal, then, is to find and eradicate the metastasized tumors to make the surgery an option for more patients. “If you can’t have surgery because you have metastatic disease, then we’re going to use this therapy to treat that metastatic disease first so they can operate,” she said. To do this, Sutcliffe and her long-time collaborators at the
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