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Physicist Andrew Quong, Ph.D., would like nothing better than to cure cancer, and he thinks that the burgeoning field of nanotechnology is just the ticket to accomplish it. He concedes it won’t be easy.

Recently appointed associate professor of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Dr. Quong sees nanotechnology as poised to make inroads in tumor imaging, detection and diagnostics, and in time, therapeutics.

Dr. Quong has many plans, and perhaps chief among them, to consolidate and better organize the nanotechnology efforts of researchers at Jefferson Medical College under one umbrella. Collaboration will be key, says Dr. Quong, who came to Jefferson earlier this year from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he was director of the Nanotechnology and Integrative Cancer Biology Division at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“Andrew Quong brings unique strengths that will take nanotechnology capabilities at Thomas Jefferson University and the Kimmel Cancer Center to the next level,” says Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson and professor and chair of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College. “We believe nanotechnology will be transformational in early detection and improving the quality of patient treatment. We are fortunate to have recruited a leader of Dr. Quong’s caliber and to have brought his team here to the Kimmel Cancer Center.”

Nanotechnology, Dr. Quong says, has clearly come of age, and has the potential to “revolutionize” molecular and personalized medicine. “If we can come up with assays that will allow us to detect disease early or help with diagnosis, we can take advantage of nanoscale science to have better sensitivity, more robustness, and smaller biological test samples. It will allow us to probe things like blood serum proteins for detection of disease, for example.

“Nanotechnology might also help identify molecular markers to see if the drug being tested is doing what it is expected to do,” he says. “Tumor cells that are killed and shed in the blood, for example, can be detected. Nanotechnology can help develop better tests to screen tumor proteins.”

Dr. Quong and his wife and colleague Judy Quong, Ph.D., assistant professor of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College, are exploring the use of cantilevers to measure changes in surface stress when a molecule in blood binds to it, developing what he terms a “multiplexed assay.” He hopes to be able to use the work to design a way to both diagnose disease and determine who is responding to therapy.

“We are looking at the correlation between the gene and protein expression in breast cancer tumor samples, and then see if those corresponding protein levels are detectable and correlate in blood serum,” he explains, for disease prediction. “If we can do that, it has many advantages, particularly in lowering cost. It also eliminates the need for biopsy material.”

The technology could be extended to other cancers. “We’d like to combine these approaches, not only on the technology side and detection side, but we also want to look at molecular profiles of someone undergoing treatment.”

Before coming to Jefferson, Dr. Quong was Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology, Division Director in Nanotechnology and Integrative Cancer Biology and Associated Professor in the Department of Physics from 2004 to 2005 at Georgetown.

He was Deputy Director of the Biosecurity and Nanoscience Laboratory at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 2003 to 2004, when he left for Georgetown. Prior to that, he was Scientific Capabilities Leader in Computational Systems Science from 2001 to 2004 and in Computational Materials Science from 2000 to 2001, both at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. From 1999 to 2001, Dr. Quong was Program Manager in the Office of Basic Energy Sciences at the United States Department of Energy in Germantown, MD.

A member of several prestigious professional and scientific societies, including the American Physical Society and the Biophysical Society, he has published widely in such journals as Physical Review Letters and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He has been a reviewer for journals and organizations, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health Special Emphasis Panel for the Review of Centers of Excellence in Complex Biomedical Research.

Dr. Quong received bachelor of arts degrees in applied mathematics and physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He earned a master of science degree in physics in 1987 and a doctor of philosophy degree in physics in 1991 from the University of California, Irvine.