IDEA Lab: Image Guided Delivery of Engineering Advances
A collaboration of the School of Medicine and Engineering, the IDEA Lab serves as a meeting point of clinicians and engineers to bring advances in cutting edge materials science and engineering to the clinical practice in interventional radiology, and in particular, interventional oncology.
What is Interventional Oncology?
A subset of Interventional Radiology, interventional oncology focuses on using image guidance to diagnose, treat cancer (via ablation, or embolization), provide durable vascular access, and to palliatively treat symptoms occurring from the cancers themselves such as biliary obstruction or enteric feeding.
PI: Avik Som, MD, PhD
Avik Som, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Radiology (Division of Interventional Radiology), and Material Science Engineering. He completed his B.Sc in Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and then completed a combination MD/PhD training at Washington University in St. Louis. His PhD work was under Dr. Samuel Achilefu focused on developing novel calcium carbonate nanoparticles to change tumor pH. At the same time he has had a long history of pursuing bio-entrepreneurship. As a medical student, helped found a biomedical incubator, Sling Health, and spun out a digital health company (Epharmix, later CareSignal Health) focused on value based health.
After medical school, Dr. Som completed an integrated residency in interventional and diagnostic radiology at the Massachusetts General Hospital. While there he did simultaneous post-doctoral training with Robert Langer and C. Giovanni Traverso at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with work focused on creating image guided drug delivery for novel cancer immunotherapy, work translated commercially to Absco Therapeutics.
At the IDEA Lab, Dr. Som leads the translation of novel material science advances for applications in interventional radiology based on his clinical practice, with a focus on novel cancer therapeutics, tissue engineering, and device development. The goal of the lab is to generate new technologies inspired by the clinic and brought back to treat our patients.
What we do
Intratumoral Immuno-oncology – As interventional radiologists, we can see cancer non-invasively, and as a part of that we can biopsy or deliver therapies (heat, cold, alcohol, radiation, chemotherapies) to treat those cancers. Rarely, we can see an “abscopal” effect, where our therapy induces an effect distantly, i.e. treating metastasis. In the era of immunotherapy, our goal has been to create an in situ cancer vaccine that could teach the body that what we see radiologically is cancer, and use that anatomic information to teach the body’s primary defense, the immune system, what cancer is for that particular patient. Our work resulted in ImmunoGel, published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, and is currently being commercialized by Absco Therapeutics for parenchymal treatment in the liver, lung, etc.. At IDEA Lab, we build on this seminal work by looking at ways to ensure all cancers can be treated, including highly vascular, osseous or lymphatic lesions.
https://youtu.be/FN3EzRuNyig
Gel-Dissection: Interventional Radiologists modify the environment to thermally ablate or reach many lesions without ever cutting a patient open to “see”. This however results in challenges in moving organs away. Gel-Dissection is a technology we, in collaboration with Srinivasan lab at Harvard Engineering, have built to use hydrogels to move critical organs, expanding our reach. This work was published recently in Advanced Healthcare Materials.
Tissue Engineering: In collaboration with the Miqin Zhang Laboratory, the IDEA Lab has been focused on developing regenerative approaches for patients in bone and liver, focused on combining cancer immunotherapy with post treatment tissue regeneration and recovery.
Click to see all of our publications here.
Join Us – We’re Recruiting!
Click here for the application.
For all positions, please feel free to reach out directly to Dr. Avik Som at aviksom@uw.edu. To help all applicants, please do fill out this application here with some FAQs.
Post-Doctoral Fellows: Post-doctoral fellows are welcome, with particular backgrounds in engineering, immunology, biomedical and materials science highly valued. Post-docs with radiology backgrounds are also highly welcome. A Post-Doctoral fellowship at the IDEA Lab will be a launch pad to careers in academia or industry with a focus on interventional radiology and biomaterial sciences.
Radiology/ Interventional Radiology Residents: For resident physicians, the IDEA Lab provides a consulting opportunity where residents can be involved with teams of engineers to create novel inventions while maintaining clinical excellence in demanding residency. An experience with the lab can be highly valuable to those interested in eventual collaborations with industry and making new devices and technology. Please feel free to reach out directly to Dr. Avik Som at aviksom@uw.edu or catch him during clinical rotations to discuss.
MD/PhD or PhD Students: PhD students can pursue degree programs in materials science engineering and biomedical engineering. An education beginning at the IDEA Lab can be foundational to IR Research Science. PhD students can be co-advised as well for a full clinical and scientific experience.
Masters Students: The IDEA Lab is excited to work with masters students, particularly from Materials Science Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.
Medical Students: The IDEA Lab has a long track record of being part of the radiology research collaborative and combining clinical research and device research projects to enable students. Prior medical students have gone on to competitive residencies in radiology, IR, surgery, and medicine.
Undergraduate Students: The IDEA Lab can be a fantastic location to have an introduction to biomedical sciences, engineering, and medicine
Contact Us
Email: aviksom@uw.edu