HANOVER — A team of Dartmouth College researchers studying prostate cancer surgery has been awarded a $31.3 million grant as part of the federal government’s Cancer Moonshot program.

The funding for the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College was part of $150 million in grants awarded to eight research institutions and businesses focused on tumor removal that President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden announced on Tuesday, according to a news release from the White House.

The grants are part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which was passed with bipartisan support in March 2022. Since then, the government has awarded more than $400 million to organizations that are focused on methods “to fast-track progress on how we prevent, detect, and treat cancer,” according to the release. This round of funding is through ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program.

The $31.3 million grant will support Dartmouth research focused on developing tools to will help surgeons identify healthy tissues and nerves while performing laparoscopic surgery to remove tumors, said Keith D. Paulsen, a Thayer professor who is a team lead on the project along with professors Kimberley Samkoe, Ryan Halter and Scott Davis.

Paulsen described the project as creating a GPS system that updates in real time to alert motorists to closed roads and detours. The researchers are working with a fluid that can help identify healthy nerves and blood vessels outside of the surgeon’s field of vision.

“We’re kind of helping to try to find the normal things in the road map that you don’t want to inadvertently damage,” said Paulsen, who is also a radiology and surgery professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, the scientific director at the Center for Surgical Innovation at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, and the co-director of the Translational Engineering in Cancer Research Program at Dartmouth Cancer Center.

Surgeons performing prostate surgery are usually looking through an opening around the size of a quarter.

“Your eyes really can’t penetrate tissue,” Paulsen said. “The surgeon can really only see the surface.

“They know the anatomy of course, but it’s really helpful to know what’s right behind that view, a little deeper.”

Prostate cancer is the second-most common cancer men are diagnosed with in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It also is one of the leading cancers that causes death in men of all ages.

There were 236,659 new prostate cancers reported in 2021; 33,363 men died from the disease in 2022, according to data compiled by the CDC.

Nerve injury occurs in about 10% of prostate surgery cancer cases and up to 30% of patients report side effects from surgical procedures including incontinence and sexual dysfunction, according to research provided by Dartmouth as part of its grant application.

To help prevent such damage, the Dartmouth team is working on developing tools that can “read” the fluid and “augment a video stream that the surgeons are already using to do this more advanced detection,” Paulsen said.

The procedure is known as fluorescence-guided surgery and the prostate-specific tools Dartmouth is developing are similar to those already being used in head, neck and brain cancer surgeries.

The recently announced grant money will support the team’s work for seven years, including hiring up to four additional staff members, said Paulsen.

Dartmouth researchers heard about the grant program around a year ago and quickly got to work on putting together the proposal. They had an inkling they were being considered when they received a request for more information in the first few months of 2024.

“We had a lot of the technology, a lot of the know-how to put it all together when we saw the call for proposals,” Paulsen said. “We have a pretty fast deadline. We’re hoping to be in humans in a couple years with the whole system.”

Paulsen and his three colleagues will lead a team of researchers at six organizations: Dartmouth Health, Dartmouth start-up QUEL Imaging, Johns Hopkins University, Oregon Health and Science University, Intuitive Surgical and Trace Biosciences, according to a news release from the Thayer School of Engineering.

The other grant recipients announced Tuesday were Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, Tulane University, University of California, San Francisco, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington and Cision Vision, according to the White House.

President Barack Obama started the Cancer Moonshot effort in 2016, “to accelerate scientific discovery in cancer research, foster greater collaboration, and improve the sharing of cancer data,” according to the National Cancer Institute. In 2022, the Bidens, who lost a son to cancer, re-established the program; one of its goals is to cut the rate of cancer deaths in half by 2047.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.