The intraoperative imaging system from Lumicell (LUMISIGHT and Lumicell Direct Visualization System) recently received FDA approval for use in breast cancer patients. The system has 84% diagnostic accuracy in detecting residual cancer, in real-time, that may have been otherwise missed during surgery.
"This project started as a collaboration between the Kirsch lab when I was at Duke and engineers at MIT including Moungi Bawendi, PhD, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry," said former faculty member David Kirsch, MD, PhD (pictured).
The work in the Kirsch lab was led by then-students Jeffrey Mito, MD, PhD, and Melodi Javid Whitley, MD, PhD. Duke then conducted a pivotal phase I first-in-human clinical trial of patients with sarcomas and breast cancers from 2012-2015 – "Study of the Safety and Activation of a Cathepsin-Activatable Fluorescent Cancer Specific Probe LUM015 (in Sarcoma and Breast Cancer Patients)." The clinical trial was led by Brian Brigman, MD, with instrumental contributions from Shelley Hwang, MD, MPH, and Joan Cahill, BNS, OCN, CCRP (pictured). Thanks to everyone involved with this trial for their collaboration and for making this research possible.