3 cancer-fighting innovations coming out of Houston institutions

Research roundup

From a new cancer-detecting device to a digital resource for childhood cancer survivors, here are some cancer-fighting innovations from Houston. Getty Images

Not all heroes wear capes. Some wear lab coats. Almost daily, it seems there's a new breakthrough or discovery for life-saving innovations.

These three cancer-related innovations are coming out of Houston, and they are ones to watch.

University of Houston's biosensor for prostate cancer reoccurrence

Dmitri Litvinov, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, is on a mission to bring an effective, low-cost test for prostate cancer recurrence to doctor's offices everywhere. Photo via uh.edu

Researchers from the University of Houston have teamed up with their colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania to try to get a biosensor that can detect the recurrence of prostate cancer into the doctor's office.

The research is funded by a $399,988 grant from the National Science Foundation and led by Dmitri Litvinov, principal investigator and professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH.

"Such tests exist in clinical laboratories, but there remains a critical need for inexpensive, versatile and high-sensitivity diagnostic platforms which can bring the performance to the point of care or doctor's office," says Litvinov in a release.

The biosensor platform would be less than $3 per test — an alluring fact for patients and health care providers — and would function more or less like a pregnancy test, but without a simple positive or negative response. Rather, the test can assess how much prostate-specific antigen is in a patient's blood

"Our technology has potential to help improve survival rates with more accessible, affordable and easier testing," Litvinov says.

Rice University's study that points to new cancer-fighting drug

José Onuchic co-authored a study that's opening doors for a new approach in cancer drug development. Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that a cancer-linked version of the protein mitoNEET can shut the gateways of mitochondria cells that supply chemical energy.

José Onuchic, a physicist and co-director of Rice University's Center for Theoretical Biological Physics, co-authored the paper and noted that the gateways, called voltage-dependent anion channels, or VDACs, typically open and shut to allow the passage of metabolites and other small molecules between mitochondria and the rest of the cell.

"The VDAC channel transports all types of metabolites between the cytosol and the mitochondria," says Onuchic in a release. "Dysfunction of this channel is involved in many diseases including cancer and fatty liver disease."

Co-author Patricia Jennings, a structural biologist at UCSD, explains in the news release.

"The discovery that mitoNEET directly gates VDAC, the major porin of mitochondria, as well as the accompanying structural analysis and predictions for this interaction, affords a new platform for investigations of methods to induce cancer cells to commit cell suicide, or apoptosis/ferroptosis, in a cancer-specific, regulated process," she writes.

The study opens doors for a new approach to cancer-treating drugs.

"Fine-tuning a drug that specifically alters the redox-state of interaction between VDAC and mitoNEET would allow the development of new weapons to battle multiple cancers," Onuchic says.

Baylor College of Medicine's digital tool for childhood cancer survivors

Baylor College of Medicine has created an online resource for childhood cancer survivors. Photo via bcm.edu

Childhood cancer survivors face a lifetime of obstacles to overcome, and Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Cancer Center have developed a resource to help these patients have the best quality of life in remission.

Passport for Care, a free online resource, features a "survivorship care plan" for the patient, his or her doctor, and family members. The program's new Screenings Recommendations Generator tool can provide a childhood cancer survivor with potential late effects and how to manage their care.

"This tool is especially helpful for patients who have moved on to other doctors who they did not see as a child and who might not be familiar with their particular treatment and the subsequent health risks," says Dr. David Poplack, founder of the Passport for Care and associate director of the Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Centers, in a news release. "It helps physicians understand their patient's history and know how to address future health problems."

Over 37,000 cancer survivors are using Passport for Care at 138 clinics around the world. Additionally, patients can also register through the Screenings Recommendations Generator.

Passport for Care is funded by the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas, as well as through a grant from Hyundai Hope on Wheels.

"We created Passport for Care with the goal of empowering survivors in their healthcare decisions," Poplack says. "Their care doesn't end when cancer treatment is over. Survivorship care is a lifelong journey."

A new prostate cancer treatment at Houston Methodist is enhancing the system's patient care. Getty Images

New technology gives this Houston hospital a competitive edge

Guest column

As the top ranking hospital in Texas and one of the biggest employers in Houston, Houston Methodist Hospital is poised to treat the thousands of Texan men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year.

Building on its legacy of delivering advanced cancer treatment, the healthcare giant is one of the first hospitals in the United States to offer men a benign approach to treating localized prostate cancer, using high intensity focused ultrasound, or HIFU. HIFU is a minimally invasive procedure that allows patients to maintain their quality of life with potentially fewer side effects.

Changing the standard of care

For decades, men diagnosed with prostate cancer have had three ways to manage their disease. The first is watchful waiting or active surveillance. Prostate cancer is often slow growing and may not impact the patient during his lifetime. Despite reassuring data in large randomized trials, some patients are still uncomfortable with a diagnosis of cancer and prefer treatment.

On the other end of the spectrum is the complete treatment of the prostate, which involves either surgically removing the entire organ (radical prostatectomy) or radiation, which can last up to eight weeks, with five rounds of treatment per week. Both treatments are known to cause long term erectile dysfunction and incontinence.

But for men diagnosed with localized prostate cancer, this new HIFU treatment bridges the gap between these three approaches. Unlike diagnostic ultrasound, which people are more familiar with, HIFU uses high-frequency sound waves to heat up and burn cancerous tissue, causing cell death. Think of holding a magnifying glass above a leaf on a sunny day. The sun's rays shine through the lens and cause the leaf to burn.

New and improved

Courtesy of Houston Methodist

With HIFU, the urologist destroys the cancerous tissue without damaging other surrounding structures, which include nerves, blood vessels and muscle tissue. While HIFU has only been able to treat the entire prostate or large areas, Houston Methodist has a new technology, called the Focal One, that can zero in on specific areas to treat. The doctor can draw precise contours around the diseased tissue, destroy only that portion of the prostate and minimize any damage to surrounding tissue. This further decreases the possibility of incontinence and erectile dysfunction.

A competitive edge

Focal One gives Houston Methodist Hospital urologists the ability to plum the depths of something until recently considered heresy. The possibility of focal therapy to ablate only the diseased portion of the prostate is similar to performing a lumpectomy to remove only the diseased tissue of the breast in breast cancer. And focal therapy still leaves doctors with the options of radical surgery or radiation, should the cancer return. They don't necessarily burn any bridges.

Although focal HIFU treatment is available around the world for localized prostate cancer and studies in Europe have demonstrated its safety and efficacy, there are no long term follow up data in the U.S. at this time. So far, treatment complication rates in HIFU have shown to be as good as or better than other therapies. But urologic surgeons in the US generally need 10 years of data to establish focal therapy as a standard treatment, which is why it is important for cancer centers that embrace HIFU to enroll patients in an ongoing registry trial.

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Brian Miles, M.D, is a practicing urologist and professor of urology at the Institute for Academic Medicine at Houston Methodist.

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FDA greenlights Houston surgery robotics company's unique technology

headed to clinical trials

A Houston surgical robotics company has gotten a Investigational Device Exemption from the FDA to go forward with human trials.

This news allows EndoQuest Robotics to begin its Prospective Assessment of a Robotic-Assisted Device in Gastrointestinal Medicine (PARADIGM) study, which will be conducted at leading United States health care facilities, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston), Mayo Clinic (Scottsdale), Cleveland Clinic (Cleveland), AdventHealth (Orlando), and HCA Healthcare (Houston). The study will include surgeries on 50 subjects, who will hopefully begin to enroll in January.

“The foundational thesis is we're trying to make sure that the world's largest medical center is also the world's largest med tech innovation center,” Eduardo Fonseca, interim CEO of EndoQuest Robotics, tells InnovationMap.

His company is well on its way to helping to assure that, through making history of its own. EndoQuest is behind the world's first Flexible Robotic Surgical System, a technology that may one day transform surgery as we know it.

The idea to use these novel robots for surgery came from Dr. Todd Wilson, a surgeon at UTHealth Houston, who spent his medical education, residency, and fellowship at the institution.

“I had really focused in my practice on trying to do everything possible to improve outcomes for patients,” Wilson explains. “And there seemed to be a pretty good correlation that the smaller the incisions or the fewer incisions, the better patients would do.”

The stumbling block? The necessary small incisions are difficult for human surgeons to make with current technology. But UTHealth was part of the solution.

“Right there in the University of Texas was a microsurgical lab where they were focusing on trying to develop robotics, but the application was still a little bit fuzzy,” Wilson says.

Using their innovations to solve Wilson’s problem turned out to be the start of the company now known as EndoQuest Robotics.

The first indication for the system is for colon lesions. But in the future it could be used for practically any minimally invasive surgery (MIS). That means that the robots could help to perform anything from a tonsillectomy to cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) to non-invasive colorectal procedures, should those lesions prove to be cancerous.

According to Fonseca, last year was the first on record that there were more MIS, including laparoscopic and robotic surgeries, than conventional ones in the U.S. The time is right to forge ahead with the flexible robotic surgical system. Days ago, the EndoQuest team announced that its Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) application for its pivotal colorectal clinical study was approved by the FDA.

“Our end point is a device that can be mass-manufactured and very safe for patients and has a short learning curve, so therefore, we intend to learn a lot during these trials that will inform our ultimate design,” says Fonseca.

He adds that it’s a “brilliant” group of engineers that has set EndQuest apart, including both teams in Houston and in South Korea.

“We can move twice as fast as anyone else,” jokes engineer Jiwon Choi.

Despite the extra brain power provided by the South Korea engineers, Fonseca says that EndoQuest’s beginnings are “as much of a Houston story as you could find.”

Founder bets on Houston to grow innovative corrosion detection technology

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 265

Despite having success in taking his technology from lab to commercialization, Anwar Sadek made the strategic decision to move his company, Corrolytics, from where it was founded in Ohio to Houston.

"Houston is the energy capital of the world. For the technology we are developing, it is the most strategic move for us to be in this ecosystem and in this city where all the energy companies are, where all the investors in the energy space are — and things are moving really fast in Houston in terms of energy transition and developing the current infrastructure," Sadek, co-founder and CEO of Corrolytics, says on the Houston Innovators Podcast.

And as big as a move as it was, it was worth it, Sadek says.

"It's been only a year that we've been here, but we've made the most developments, the most outreach to clients in this one last year."

The technology Sadek and his team have created is a tool to detect microbial corrosion — a major problem for industrial businesses, especially within the energy sector. Sadek describes the product as being similar to a testing hit a patient would use at home or in a clinic setting to decipher their current ailments.

Users of the Corrolytics test kit can input their pipeline sample in the field and receive results via Corrolytics software platform.

"This technology, most importantly, is noninvasive. It does not have to be installed into any pipelines or assets that the company currently has," Sadek explains. "To actually use it, you don't have to introduce new techniques or new processes in the current operations. It's a stand-alone, portable device."

Corrolytics approach is to help revolutionize and digitize microbial corrosion detection — both to improves efficiency and operational cost for industrial companies, but also to move the needle on a cleaner future for the energy industry.

"We are having an energy transition — that is a given. As we are bringing new energy, there will be growth of infrastructure to them. Every single path for the energy transition, corrosion will play a primary role as well," Sadek says.

Corrolytics hopes to work with new energies from the beginning to used the data they've collected to prevent corrosion in new facilities. However, the company's technology is already making an impact.

"Every year, there is about 1.2 gigaton of carbon footprint a year that is released into the environment that is associated with replacing corroded steel in general industries," Sadek says. "With Corrolytics, (industrial companies) have the ability to extend the life of their current infrastructure."

Sadek says his move to Houston has already paid off, and he cites one of the company's big wins was at the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards, where Corrolytics won two awards.

UH researchers secure $3.3M for AI-powered subsurface sensing system to revolutionize underground power lines

going under

Researchers from the University of Houston — along with a Hawaiian company — have received $3.3 million in funding to explore artificial intelligence-backed subsurface sensing system for safe and efficient underground power line installation.

Houston's power lines are above ground, but studies show underground power is more reliable. Installing underground power lines is costly and disruptive, but the U.S. Department of Energy, in an effort to find a solution, has put $34 million into its new GOPHURRS program, which stands for Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience, and Security. The funding has been distributed across 12 projects in 11 states.

“Modernizing our nation’s power grid is essential to building a clean energy future that lowers energy costs for working Americans and strengthens our national security,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in a DOE press release.

UH and Hawaii-based Oceanit are behind one of the funded projects, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Real-Time Advanced Look-Ahead Subsurface Sensor.”

The researchers are looking a developing a subsurface sensing system for underground power line installation, potentially using machine learning, electromagnetic resistivity well logging, and drone technology to predict and sense obstacles to installation.

Jiefu Chen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH, is a key collaborator on the project, focused on electromagnetic antennas installed on UAV and HDD drilling string. He's working with Yueqin Huang, assistant professor of information science technology, who leads the geophysical signal processing and Xuqing Wu, associate professor of computer information systems, responsible for integrating machine learning.

“Advanced subsurface sensing and characterization technologies are essential for the undergrounding of power lines,” says Chen in the release. “This initiative can enhance the grid's resilience against natural hazards such as wildfires and hurricanes.”

“If proven successful, our proposed look-ahead subsurface sensing system could significantly reduce the costs of horizontal directional drilling for installing underground utilities,” Chen continues. “Promoting HDD offers environmental advantages over traditional trenching methods and enhances the power grid’s resilience.”