A team of five investigators from three colleges of Kansas State University will develop a fully integrated image-guided thermal therapy platform by designing a radio-frequency (RF-) hyperthermia unit and integrating it into a 600MHz NMR Bruker AVANCE IIITM High Performance Digital NMR Spectrometer. Stefan Bossmann (Chemistry) will serve as coordinating PI of this endeavor. The proposed instrumentation will be the first high field (14 T) system capable of imaging the physiological effects and temperature distribution in small animals during RF-hyperthermia treatment. This will permit targeting, monitoring and feedback-control of nanoparticle-enhanced RF hyperthermia in cell-mediated therapies with unprecedented sensitivity. Due to the technical similarities of NMR and Magnetic Resonance Imaging devices, the resulting technology will eventually enable personalized hyperthermia treatment for treating infectious diseases and cancers in animals and humans. The highly interdisciplinary nature of the team of developers will facilitate rapid technology transfer between the Colleges of Engineering, Arts and Sciences and Veterinary Medicine. Although hyperthermia has great potential for the treatment of numerous disorders, its full potential has not been explored because of technical obstacles. A fully integrated image-guided thermal therapy platform will provide atraightforward approach to the utilization of hyperthermia as monotherapy and in synergy with other therapies, such as cytotherapy or radiation therapy. The thermal therapy platform will be made available to the research community through the participating colleges, the University of Kansas Cancer Center (UKCC), the Terry C. Johnson Cancer Center at Kansas State, the Nanotechnology Innovation Center of Kansas State (www.NICKS.edu), and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases (CEEZAD, www.ceezad.org/) at Kansas State. Collaboration with The National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF) will begin as soon as it is operational.
