PHILADELPHIA — Terence Peter Gade, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of Radiology and Cancer Biology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has been awarded a five-year, $2 million 2015 NIH Director's Early Independence Award, part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program supported by the National Institutes of Health’s Common Fund.
The award to Gade supports “exceptional early career scientists with the intellect, scientific creativity, drive, and maturity to flourish independently by bypassing the traditional post-doctoral training period.”
Gade’s project is titled “Image-Based Phenotyping of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cell Survival under Ischemic Stress: Toward Metabolic Imaging of Cancer Dormancy Using Hyperpolarized Carbon-13 Technology.”
Hepatocellular carcinoma is also known as liver cancer. This year, an estimated 35,660 adults (25,510 men and 10,150 women) in the United States will be diagnosed with primary liver cancer. An estimated 24,550 deaths (17,030 men and 7,520 women) from this disease will occur this year. Liver cancer is the tenth most common cancer and the fifth most common cause of cancer death among men, and the ninth most common cause of cancer death among women. The five-year survival rate of people with liver cancer is 17 percent.
“Cancer cells, in this case liver cancer cells, can adapt their metabolism to survive the severe metabolic stress caused by current treatments. Widely used imaging techniques, primarily MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and CT (computerized tomography), cannot detect these surviving cells,” Gade said. “By combining a better understanding of how surviving cancer cells adapt with novel imaging technology making use of carbon-13 based compounds, this study will take important steps toward the development of clinical imaging that can detect surviving cancer cells. Detecting these cells is the vital first step in eradicating them.”
Gade’s award is one of 16 grants awarded to scientists in 2015 under the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award.
Gade received his MD and PhD degrees from Cornell University. He completed residency training on the research track in diagnostic radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. While a resident, Gade co-founded the Penn Image-Guided Interventions Laboratory. He subsequently completed fellowship training in interventional radiology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests comprise image-guided interventions, cancer biology, and molecular imaging, aimed at understanding the influence of a tumor’s metabolic microenvironment on cancer cells as well as its non-cancerous stromal cells, or supportive tissue.
Gade’s research team includes Emma E. Furth, MD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and Anthony Mancuso, PhD, director of the Core Laboratory for Quantitative Metabolomics at Penn. Gade and his colleagues work in concert with the Penn Image-Guided Interventions Lab, which Gade co-directs with Stephen Hunt, MD, PhD, and Gregory Nadolski, MD.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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