Over the past 20 years, diagnostic imaging techniques have revolutionized the practice of medicine, making it possible to image the entire human body in exquisite anatomical detail. Imaging technologies such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and ultrasonography, together with high performance computers and sophisticated graphics hardware, can display detailed 3-dimensional pictures of the inside of the human body - rotating, magnifying, or panning images in as little as a few seconds.

While progress in imaging sciences has been impressive, the images have tended to focus on the anatomic characteristics of organs and tumors, such as size, shape and location. One of the challenges for the 21st century is to expand these technologies, and combine them with the advances being made in cancer biology and genetics so that they will be able to non-invasively detect and display the actual molecular events taking place in the body. For example, tagging gene therapy units with atoms that are visible by magnetic resonance or nuclear medicine imaging allows researchers to monitor the delivery and success of such new therapeutic agents.

Recognizing these tremendous opportunities, the National Cancer Institute will soon launch a forward-looking initiative that will create Centers for In Vivo Cell and Molecular Imaging (CICMIs). These Centers will bridge the gaps between the discoveries made in imaging technology, and cancer biology by bringing together investigators from a wide range of scientific areas, including imaging sciences, chemistry, radio-pharmaceutical chemistry, molecular and cellular biology, oncology, computer science, physics, and immunology. Within these Centers, researchers will have access to a concentrated pool of expertise and resources, allowing them to design and implement cutting-edge, multidisciplinary experiments that will lead to new tools for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

The expertise and commitment needed to establish a highly productive, intellectually integrated CICMI is extensive, and current efforts toward integration vary among institutions. Because a critical component of this initiative will be both to encourage new scientific partnerships and to advance ongoing research efforts, two types of grants will be made available. Institutions interested in creating a new group will apply for the support of a planning phase. This phase gives researchers the opportunity to organize the wide variety of scientists necessary into a coherent unit, and to initiate new multidisciplinary research projects. Six of these three-year grants will be awarded at a total cost of $7.2 million dollars.

In addition, grants to support a full CICMI will be available for the more established groups. Since these grants will be available on an ongoing basis, both established research groups as well as new groups, awarded the first type of grant, will be eligible to compete for a full CICMI. Eight of these grants will be awarded over a five year period at a total cost of $48 million.

"This timely initiative will provide important opportunities for researchers from many disciplines to try to translate what we now know about the molecular events in cancer into the imaging clinic," said Elias Zerhouni, M.D., chairman of radiology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions and member of NCI Board of Scientific Advisors.

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