The Center for Interventional Oncology at the National Institutes of Health: An Interview With Bradford Wood, MD

Bradford Wood, MD, is director of the Center for Interventional Oncology, chief of interventional radiology, and a senior researcher with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Center for Interventional Oncology is a collaboration among the NIH Clinical Center, NIH’s clinical research hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, the National Cancer Institute (Center for Research), and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Interventional Oncology 360 spoke with Dr. Wood about the Center for Interventional Oncology and its ongoing efforts to enhance minimally invasive cancer therapies.  

IO360: Tell us about the center. 

Wood: The Center for Interventional Oncology at the NIH is a multidisciplinary team that investigates and develops translational science. We look at ways to combine drugs, devices, imaging, and navigation in a smart fashion to improve therapies, often for cancer or vascular disease. It’s a multidisciplinary effort. You learn and grow less when you work, read, and communicate only within your own discipline. This center really leverages the unique atmosphere of the NIH, which is truly multidisciplinary. Not a day goes by when I don’t learn something from another discipline, which keeps my job exciting. 

IO360: Who is on the team at the Center for Interventional Oncology?

Wood: We have a tight-knit community of clinicians and scientists, and at the heart of our mission is interacting with other disciplines. There are urologic oncologists, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, surgical oncologists, engineers, a chemist, a physiologist, and pre-clinical translational scientists, all on or interacting heavily with our team. 

Our team is also made up of drug-delivery experts, post-doctoral scientists, students, residents, medical students taking a year off from school, PhD candidates, pre-med students, regulatory science experts, animal modeling experts, and some interventional radiology fellows as well. Our group tries to optimize minimally invasive image-guided therapies for cancer. I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with a smart team that helped to first develop implement and translate some common IO technologies. The center was developed at a time when this emerging paradigm and approach to cancer was being born.

IO360:  You have undertaken many research efforts within the IO center. Can you give us some highlights?

Wood: I learn something new every day from my teammates, and from computer scientists, software engineers, mechanical engineers, and chemists. These people are amazingly intelligent. We get the chance to take a crazy idea and try to see whether it’s going to help a patient or solve a clinical problem. A few months ago, one of these smart NIH scientists came to me and said, “What can we do with an iPhone? How can we manipulate the gyroscope and use the camera to help with needle angles as we do biopsies and ablations?” So together, we harnessed this common technology to make a prototype. 

We have a conductive catheter that inhibits bacterial colonization for a vascular access device. We have an endovascular basket that ablates large vessels shut. We have developed over the years a few different drug device imaging navigation products that ended up being commercialized by industry partners. Academic, industry, government, and regulatory partnerships leverage much of what we do. We have relationships governed by the CRADA (Cooperation Research and Development Agreement), which is a public-private partnership that lets us work side by side with industry. We create joint inventions that make it to the clinic faster. We expedite the process of getting something to the community setting, which is exciting, always working toward the underlying mission of improving public health in a cost-effective fashion. 

We’ve been lucky enough to have a few successes over the years in terms of taking a concept from an idea, to a preclinical setting, to a patient setting, to a multicenter trial, to broad commercialization. Some of those have been MRI-TRUS fusion biopsy in the prostate (but done in the office setting, outside of MRI using EM tracking/medical GPS), heat-deployed nanoparticle chemotherapy combined with radiofrequency ablation (in phase 3 trials at present), and most recently the imageable microbead for embolization of liver tumors. We’ve been working on that for about 9 years. 

Again, this is a broad team. I get credit sometimes, being the face of our group, but really this is not my work. It’s the team’s work, and there are all kinds of names and faces behind it. 

One of the great things about our discipline of IR and IO is that we’re quick to adapt to new technologies. We move quickly when technologies and opportunities present themselves. We see where they fit in, where they’re going to work and where they’re not going to work. And we rapidly adopt them and apply them and study them to see if they can actually help patients and solve problems. We also kill impractical ideas quickly.

IO360: How about education and training at the Center for Interventional Oncology?

Wood: We have a number of different education and training arms. There’s the medical research scholar program, which is 1 or 2 years off from medical school and it’s an NIH-wide program that enables those seeking to go into academics to brush up on their academic skills. There’s an imaging sciences training program, which is funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, one of the institutes of the NIH related to imaging, radiology, and engineering, which is a key part of what we do. Those fellows can come from a wide background of training from interventional radiology to engineering; they can also be PhD students. We have interventional radiology joint fellowships where fellows get their research training with us and go to an ACGME-approved fellowship for their heavy interventional radiology clinical fellowship or residency. 

We are very excited that interventional radiology is the newest kid on the block for residency training in our discipline. We don’t have a formal residency program but we have joint programs with academic centers, like Oxford University, in Oxford, United Kingdom. We share a PhD student who spends 4 years with us and also half that time at Oxford. We have mentorship relationships with students from Duke University, from Utrecht in the Netherlands, and visiting fellows from Italy, for example. We have a number of different programs. There is a PhD student from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who is getting her PhD from Johns Hopkins University but her work is a partnership with the NIH and Johns Hopkins University. We also have joint work with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, as well, funded by a different cooperative mechanism. 

There are a variety of paths to our training outfit and although we are small, again one of our strengths is that we are diverse. You open your mind to different ways of looking at things, whether it’s a different discipline or different levels of training. For example, I’ve learned things from high school students spending the summer with us because they have a fresh perspective. As the years go by, we learn to forget how to think about innovation. That’s one of the exciting things about being in this environment. There are all kinds of different backgrounds and different trainings on different levels. Everyone brings a fresh perspective.

IO360: What does the center physically look like? How it is set up?

Wood: It’s a virtual center. We are within the National Cancer Institute in part. We are funded in part by the National Cancer Institute, which we are very proud of, but we are also within the NIH Clinical Center, which is the hospital research arm. It’s America’s research hospital. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest research hospital, and every patient who comes through the door is on a study. It doesn’t always mean experimental risky therapies, but it is an amazingly unique atmosphere, and there is no other place like it. It lends itself to answering questions, and when you’re combining new technologies, trying to find out where they fit in the clinical problem-solving mode, it’s a neat place to work. 

Suggested citation: Ford J. The Center for Interventional Oncology at the National Institutes of Health: an interview With Bradford Wood, MD. Intervent Oncol 360. 2016;4(4):E61-E64.