By Ebony Thornton and Carrie Noxon
Special to Rice News
The Center for Innovation and Translation of Point-of-Care Technologies for Expanded Cancer Care Access (CITEC), a Rice University-led collaboration of partners from three continents and based in the Texas Medical Center, has announced its second round of subawardees.
CITEC is a collaboration of bioengineers, oncologists and health partners united in the goal of accelerating the development, evaluation and implementation of point-of-care technologies for early cancer detection and treatment. CITEC aims to strengthen the clinical and public health impact of these technologies worldwide and train developers and users to create and disseminate more effective and cost-effective point-of-care technologies.
Funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), CITEC issues subawards to researchers whose work supports its goal of improving access to early cancer care through the development of cost-effective solutions.
In alignment with the needs-finding activities conducted by CITEC and consistent with the priorities of NIH’s Point-of-Care Technologies Research Network (POCTRN), CITEC completed its first round of funding solicitations in January 2025. For this second round of awards, six subawardees were selected. These researchers include:
Sanchita Bhadra, research assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been awarded to continue her research to develop an affordable, single-visit test to detect 14 high-risk HPV DNA types associated with cancer, using a color-change indicator for easy results interpretation. The project involves creating detection probes, designing a multiplex device and testing on swab samples to improve HPV screening, reduce costs and minimize patient follow-up visits. This research aims to enable rapid identification of 14 hrHPV genotypes from crude samples with visual colorimetric readout on lateral flow assays.
Benjamín Castañeda, professor of biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering and imaging sciences at the University of Rochester, will develop improvements to breast ultrasound imaging without the need for a radiologist’s or sonographer’s review, providing a rapid preliminary diagnosis of breast lumps in less than 10 minutes. This technology could potentially decrease the diagnostic delays while improving clinical outcomes for breast cancer. Called the BREast cancer Volume Imaging UltraSound (BREVIUS), the technology utilizes a low-cost tablet and an ultrasound probe with or without an internet connection and leverages artificial intelligence evaluation, making it particularly well suited for outpatient and remote settings. The goal of the technology is to decrease the time to diagnosis in breast cancer and provide accurate patient referrals to hospitals.
Daniel Rosen, associate professor of pathology and immunology at Baylor College of Medicine, will continue development of the OpenFlexure Microscope, an affordable 3D-printed microscope for cancer screening in low-resource settings, optimized for telepathology use. The project includes clinical validation, local staff training and support for sustainable, accessible cancer screening through local 3D-printing facilities.
Hinnerk Schulz-Hildebrandt, investigator and instructor with the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at the Mass General Research Institute and instructor in dermatology at Harvard Medical School, is developing a tethered capsule endomicroscope for anal cancer screening. The project will fabricate tethered capsules for clinical imaging and testing during anal cancer screenings. The capsule will allow patients to be screened without the use of sedation, using optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging to provide doctors with a 3D-microscopic view of anal lesions. This research will help evaluate the accuracy of OCT-based lesion classifications in comparison to histologic diagnoses.
Daniel Fletcher, professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, is developing a miRNA-based molecular diagnostic as an alternative to traditional mammography for breast cancer screening. The project utilizes a modified CRISPR-Cas13a system to directly detect and quantify a panel of miRNAs without the need for RNA extraction, reverse transcription or amplification. By eliminating the technical complexities of traditional RT-qPCR, this project has the potential to provide a rapid, accurate and accessible screening solution for decentralized and low-resource clinical settings.
Lei Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering at Rice, has been awarded for his research on developing a low-cost LED-based photoacoustic tomography (LED-PAT) system for breast cancer screening and treatment monitoring. The LED-PAT is an affordable, portable imaging tool that uses dual-wavelength LED illumination to quantify blood oxygen saturation and detect tumor hypoxia, a critical marker of aggressive cancer, enabling early diagnosis and real-time assessment of neoadjuvant chemotherapy responses. This research holds significant potential to enhance breast cancer care, particularly in underserved settings where access to sophisticated imaging remains limited.
CITEC is funded by POCTRN, established by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the NIH under contract number 1U54EB034652-01.