Margin of Error
An $18 million ARPA-H grant will help surgeons develop a promising new cancer pathology system.
Spring 2025
By Carrie Noxon
Every year, nearly 2 million Americans are newly diagnosed with cancer. For solid tumors, surgical removal is often the first option. But, during surgery, it can be difficult to tell where a tumor ends and healthy tissue begins — an area referred to as the margin — due to a lack of contrast. The difficulty with identifying the margin can result in a patient undergoing multiple surgeries to remove an entire tumor successfully.
A new cancer pathology system from Rice and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center aims to make tissue margins easier to see and improve success at removing tumors entirely the first time.
A Rice-led multi-institutional research collaboration won an award of up to $18 million over five years from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health to develop and validate a new system for improving tumor removal accuracy for two types of cancer: breast cancer and head and neck cancer.
Called AccessPath, the novel, affordable, slide-free cancer pathology system will help surgeons know whether they have completely removed tumors during surgery by enabling rapid, automatic tumor margin classification of resected tumors. It was one of several projects funded through the ARPA-H Precision Surgical Interventions program as part of a broader $150 million Cancer Moonshot initiative under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Because of its low-cost, high-speed and automated analysis, we believe AccessPath can revolutionize real-time surgical guidance, greatly expanding the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improving outcomes for all cancer surgery patients,” said bioengineering professor Rebecca Richards-Kortum, who co-directs the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies and is the lead principal investigator on the project.
Because of its low-cost, high-speed and automated analysis, we believe AccessPath can revolutionize real-time surgical guidance, greatly expanding the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improving outcomes for all cancer surgery patients.
“The development of a new low-cost technology that enables immediate margin assessment could transform the landscape of surgical oncology — particularly in low-resource settings, reducing the number of repeat interventions, lowering cancer care costs and improving patient outcomes,” says Dr. Ana Paula Refinetti, an associate professor in the Department of Breast Surgical Oncology at MD Anderson and one of the lead surgeon PIs on the project.
AccessPath researchers include electrical and computer engineer Ashok Veeraraghavan, a co-PI on the project, and bioengineer Tomasz Tkaczyk. The team at large is working to solve key technical challenges in tumor removal, making care for surgical pathology patients timelier and more convenient, ultimately improving patient outcomes.
The AccessPath system is intended to be an affordable end-to-end system for immediate digital pathology of resected tumors, with the potential to greatly expand the range of hospitals able to provide accurate intraoperative tumor margin assessment and improve outcomes for all cancer patients treated with surgery.
Rebecca Richards-Kortum is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, professor of bioengineering and co-director of Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies. Ashok Veeraraghavan is professor and chair of electrical and computer engineering and professor of computer science at Rice. Tomasz Tkaczyk is professor of bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering at Rice. Dr. Ana Paula Refinetti is associate professor in the Department of Breast Surgical Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center.