More than $2.3 million in research funding was awarded to Hua Li, adjunct research associate professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and in Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Li, also a medical physicist at the Carle Cancer Center, Urbana, Illinois, received this funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support two of her cancer-related research projects. The overarching goal of the projects is to provide a group of clinically-useful models to predict disease control outcomes from current cancer treatments.
Li’s first project, “Multimodal Biomarkers for Oropharyngeal Cancer,” received $2 million. This five-year R01 project aims to create a biomarker-based clinical decision-making tool to separate cancers with good prognoses from those with poor prognoses in the head and neck. The second project, “Radiomics-based Prognostic Model of Cervical Cancer Habitats,” received $370,000 in funding. This prognostic modeling innovation will allow clinicians to make more informed decisions about the best radiation treatments for cervical cancer patients. Li is working on both projects with colleagues from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Professor Li will be presenting on her research at Illinois on November 19, 2019 from 12:00-1:00 PM in the Charles G. Miller Auditorium in the Chemical Life Sciences Laboratory (B102) as part of the Cancer Center at Illinois Faculty Seminar Series. Li will also discuss future directions and opportunities for collaboration in this lecture.