ECEN faculty members receive funding from DOD Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program

The Prostate Cancer Research Program of Army Medical Research and Material Command recently awarded a New Investigator Award grant to an Oklahoma-based research team. This team consists of Dr. Daqing Piao (PI of the project) and Dr. Charles Bunting in ECEN, Dr. Kenneth E. Bartels and Dr. G. Reed Holyoak in OSU Center for Veterinary Health Sciences, Dr. Sreenivas N. Vemulapalli in Urology Department of University of Oklahoma Health Science Center, as well as two graduate students in ECEN.

The objective of this research is to develop a novel “trans-rectal optical tomography” technique, and to validate the pre-clinical value of this technique for prostate cancer imaging using canine prostate cancer models. Each year hundreds of thousands of patients undergo prostate biopsy, many of which are unnecessary. The success of this project may significantly reduce the unnecessary biopsies. This 3-year research, entitled as “Trans-rectal Near-Infrared Optical Tomography for Prostate Imaging”, may be the first prostate cancer-related project in Oklahoma that is funded by DOD.