Yixuan Wu, Engr ’24 (PhD)—now a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics—has won an Early Investigator Research Award from the Department of Defense’s Prostate Cancer Research Program, which supports research opportunities focused on prostate cancer for individuals in the early stages of their careers. Wu’s $484,013 award will fund his research on prostate cancer detection over the next two years.
Prostate cancer is the second most prevalent malignancy among men and the fifth primary contributor to cancer-related death globally, according to a report in the International Journal of Cancer. Current prostate cancer detection approaches—such as prostate-specific antigen tests, transrectal ultrasounds, MRIs, and PET scans—have issues with sensitivity, specificity, or cost-effectiveness, or are simply inaccessible to underserved populations like minorities and people living in rural areas.
“There is a pressing imperative for the development of more accessible and cost-effective strategies that can not only bridge the disparities in prostate cancer care, but also elevate the precision of prostate cancer detection,” Wu says.
His upcoming project aims to use functional ultrasound imaging as an alternative solution to facilitate the simpler, less expensive, and more comprehensive early diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer. To do so, he and his team plan to leverage prostate-specific membrane antigen, or PSMA, as a biomarker and propose imaging it with a multiparametric ultrasound approach.
“As a PhD student at Johns Hopkins, I did groundbreaking work showing how special dyes combined with ultrasound imaging can help us see how cancer behaves in the body,” says Wu. “Now, I am dedicated to taking this idea even further.”
According to Wu, ultrasound imaging offers many advantages over other approaches, including wider accessibility, lower cost, less patient preparation, shorter scan times, and potentially higher image resolution. He and his team ultimately envision an all-in-one ultrasound system capable of accurately detecting prostate cancer with increased affordability and accessibility for underserved populations, thereby mitigating the disparities currently present in prostate cancer diagnosis.
“I’m lucky to have three amazing mentors for my project, who are experts in areas such as radiology, urology, engineering, and imaging science,” Wu says.
These mentors include Emad Boctor, the director of the Medical UltraSound Imaging and Intervention Collaboration Research Laboratory; Brad Wood, the founding director of the Center for Interventional Oncology and chief of interventional radiology at the National Institutes of Health; and Martin Pomper, a former professor of radiology and radiological science at Hopkins, now the chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Wu is also joined in his efforts by co-investigators Jeeun Kang, an assistant professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Wojciech Lesniak, a former research associate in the Department of Radiology and Radiological Science, now an assistant professor at UT Southwestern. Purang Abolmaesumi, a professor at the University of British Columbia and the inventor of the temporal enhanced ultrasound, will also be consulting on the project.
“I am driven by the passion to translate innovative advancements from the laboratory to real-world clinical applications, ensuring that patients directly benefit from my research,” says Wu. “My career goal is to become a leader in the field of cancer imaging, specifically using ultrasound technology and medical robots to help doctors better understand and treat cancer.”