The Cancer Bioengineering Collaborative awards seed grants to promote collaborative research projects between Rice University and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, accelerating the translation of research into impactful innovations for cancer diagnosis and treatment.
- Current Funding Opportunities:
The next call for seed grant proposals will be announced Fall of 2026.
Current Awardees:
- “Conformal inference of risk prediction in benefit from immunotherapy” led by Huixia Judy Wang, Professor and Chair of the Department of Statistics and William Marsh Rice Trustee Professor in Data Science at Rice; and Wenyi Wang, Professor of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology and Biostatistics at MD Anderson.
- “AI-driven engineering of antigen-targeted T cell receptors” led by Caleb Bashor, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering & BioSciences at Rice; Tao Wang, Associate Professor, Department of Bioinformatics & Computational Biology at MD Anderson; and Cassian Yee, Professor of Immunology and Melanoma Medical Oncology at MD Anderson.
- “Engineering Synthetic Tumor Beacons to Accelerate Pancreatic Cancer Diagnosis” led by Kevin McHugh, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Chemistry at Rice and a Cancer Research and Prevention Institute of Texas (CPRIT) scholar; and Pratip Bhattacharya, Professor of Cancer Systems Imaging and Imaging Physics at MD Anderson.
Past Projects:
- “Enhancing CAR-T immunotherapy via precision CRISPR/Cas-based epigenome engineering of high value therapeutic gene targets,” led by Isaac Hilton, Associate Professor of Biosciences and Bioengineering at Rice and a scholar; and Michael Green, Professor of Lymphoma & Myeloma at MD Anderson.
- “Nanocluster and KRAS inhibitor-based combination therapy for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma,” led by Linlin Zhang, Assistant Research Professor of Bioengineering at Rice; and Haoqiang Ying, Associate Professor of Molecular and Cellular Oncology at MD Anderson.
- “Engineering tumor-infiltrating Fusibacterium as a microbial cancer therapy,” led by Jeffrey Tabor, Professor of Biosciences at Rice, and Christopher Johnston, Associate Professor of Genomic Medicine at MD Anderson.
- “Preclinical study of nanoscale TRAIL liposomes as a neoadjuvant therapy for colorectal cancer liver metastasis,” led by Michael King, the E.D. Butcher Professor of Bioengineering at Rice, CPRIT scholar, and special advisor to the provost on life science collaborations with the Texas Medical Center; and Xiling Shen, Professor of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology at MD Anderson.
- “Deciphering molecular mechanisms of cellular plasticity in MDS progression,” led by Ankit Patel, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice and of Neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine; and Pavan Bachireddy, Assistant Professor of Hematopoietic Biology and Malignancy, Lymphoma & Myeloma at MD Anderson.