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University of Illinois Cancer Center members Gye Young Park, MD, and Kevin Haas, MD, are the recipients of the 2025 Cancer Center Pilot Project Program award. The one-year, $50,000 award will support their project, “Development of Novel Biomarkers to Enhance the Diagnostic Accuracy of EBUS/TBNA in Identifying Metastatic Lymph Nodes of Primary Lung Malignancies.”

A Cancer Center Cancer Biology Research Program member, Park is Professor of Medicine in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep and Allergy at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at UIC. He is a cancer immunologist focusing on dendritic cells and macrophages in lung cancer. Haas, a Cancer Center Cancer Prevention and Control Research Program member, is Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine in the same division, and he focuses on lung diseases.

The Cancer Center Pilot Project Program offers funding for projects proposed by its members to encourage new collaborative cancer research projects. These pilot project grants stimulate new inter-programmatic research initiatives, leading to competitive grant applications to external peer-reviewed funding organizations, specifically organizations on the National Cancer Institute (NCI) peer review list.

Learn more about their project in the abstract excerpted below. 

“EBUS-TBNA is an essential procedure used to sample hilar and mediastinal lymph nodes for the diagnosis and staging of lung cancer. However, its accuracy can be limited because the small needle samples may occasionally yield non-diagnostic results. Our sc-RNAseq data revealed that metastatic lymph nodes contained higher proportions of APOE-high macrophages. These specific macrophages in metastatic LNs displayed gene expression patterns indicative of a pro-tumoral function. We hypothesize that APOE-high macrophages in EBUS-TBNA samples are closely associated with metastasis, and their markers could improve diagnostic accuracy. Given that sc-RNAseq is not easily implementable in clinical settings, the proposed study aims to identify specific protein markers for these APOE-high macrophages using CITE-seq and flow cytometry on patient EBUS-TBNA samples. The ultimate goal is to develop antibody-based diagnostic tools for clinical use to enhance the precision of diagnosing lung cancer.”