Case Western Reserve University leads NIH academic–industrial partnership to develop rapid, chairside oral cancer test
CLEVELAND—A Case Western Reserve University–led research team is developing a noninvasive oral cancer test to help clinicians decide—chairside and within minutes— whether a suspicious lesion in the mouth needs a biopsy. The project pairs a discovery made in the university’s School of Dental Medicine with device-engineering and microfabrication expertise from the Case School of Engineering and the commercialization capabilities of industry partner Hemex Health Inc. of Portland, Oregon. The work is supported by a new five-year, $2.93 million grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The type of grant is an NIH award structured as an academic–industrial partnership: It teams university researchers with a company to advance technology from the lab to a commercial, point-of-care product. “Our goal is to take a sophisticated laboratory measurement and engineer it into a simple, affordable device that works reliably at the chairsi...
