Report on cancer detection research lauded

An Arizona State University engineering professor’s contributions to a research team making promising strides in cancer detection has been recognized by a major international organization.

Seungchan Kim is the senior author of a report on the work that earned the prize for the best scientific paper at the recent International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine in Washington, D.C. The conference was organized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's leading professional association for the advancement of technology.

Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering, a part of ASU’s Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. As a joint hire of the university and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Phoenix, Kim also leads the institute's Biocomputing Unit in Computational Biology Division.

Kim has been working with the TGen-based team in a study of lung cancer, in which researchers are using molecular imaging as well as microRNAs – small molecules that regulate gene expression in cells –  to help understand and predict how malignant lung cancer often spreads to the brain. The results promise to provide knowledge that will enable physicians to provide more effective care for lung cancer patients.

The research paper on the project was chosen for the conference’s top prize from among more than 230 scientific papers submitted.

The study is being funded in part by the IBIS Foundation of Arizona, Science Foundation Arizona and the National Institutes of Health.

To learn more, visit http://www.tgen.org/news/index.cfm?newsid=1730