Rutgers-Led Consortium Receives $6.5 Million Federal Award: Modeling to Advance Lung Cancer Prevention and Screening
Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, Middlesex County, New Jersey, announced that a seven-university consortium it leads has received a five-year, $6.5 million award from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to use computer modeling to compare lung cancer prevention and screening strategies and give national policymakers quantitative evidence. The award is part of the Cancer Intervention and Surveillance Modeling Network (CISNET).
The consortium's contact principal investigator is Jamie Tam, an associate professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health; Rafael Meza is among the project's multiple principal investigators. Alongside Rutgers, the consortium includes Stanford University, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Purdue University, the University of Michigan and Harvard University.
Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, killing about 125,000 people a year. Low-dose CT screening has been shown to reduce lung cancer deaths among high-risk people, yet fewer than 20 percent of those eligible are actually screened. Questions such as who should be screened, at what ages and how often, how screening should be paired with smoking-cessation support, and whether newer early-detection tests are worth adopting all require weighing benefits and harms across whole populations — precisely the task modeling is built for.
CISNET's lung group has been modeling these questions for 25 years, and its analyses helped shape national lung cancer screening guidelines. The new award will fund the consortium to keep simulating the effects and costs of competing strategies across different populations, so that future guideline updates rest on evidence.
The researchers say their aim is to work out which strategies save the most lives for the resources available — and to help close the gap between the people who qualify for screening on paper and the far smaller number who actually receive it.
(Source: Rutgers University)
Source: Rutgers University
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 罗格斯大学老女王楼（Old Queens）。图片来自 Wikimedia Commons，CC BY 4.0。 / Old Queens at Rutgers University. Image via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
