Background

In June 1999, NASA and NCI jointly sponsored a Workshop on Sensors for Biomolecular Signatures that explored the range of technologies under development in the community to address our common goals. A specific objective of the workshop was to bring together investigators from diverse backgrounds including those developing technologies that will have a profound impact on the early detection and treatment of cancer on one hand and the potential for revolutionizing robotic space exploration on the other. Participation in the workshop was based on invitation and 135 investigators from a broad variety of disciplines attended. The workshop served as a forum for information exchange, idea generation, and has stimulated numerous discussions likely to result in interdisciplinary collaboration. Based on the outcome of this workshop and further discussions, NASA and NCI entered a joint planning process to promote development of technologies that can detect the earliest signatures of disease and provide early, specific intervention.

On April 13, 2000, NCI and NASA entered in to a formal Memorandum of Understanding and hosted the first NASA/NCI Collaborative Working Group on Bio-Molecular Systems and Technology. The specific aim of the Working Group was to define the opportunities and critical directions of research needed to advance the development of technologies and informatics tools to enable minimally-invasive detection, diagnosis, and management of disease and injury. The Working Group membership included an outstanding group of scientists and technologists from academia, government laboratories and industry, representing a diverse set of disciplines. The Chair of the Working Group was Dr. David Baltimore, President, California Institute of Technology.

Discussions of the Working Group confirmed that to meet the overlapping objectives of NASA and the NCI would require the development of new tools and strategies for: 1) signal generation; 2) signal acquisition; 3) signal processing; 4) analysis and interpretation; and, 5) intervention. These techniques must be compatible with the integrated capabilities for non-invasive detection of, and response to, signatures of disease in the living body.

Specific recommendations from the Working Group related to the approach NASA and NCI might effectively take to promoting discovery of an integrated system included the following:

• Fundamental research should be stressed, particularly at the early stages.
• Early research should focus on generic problems.
• Efforts should promote multidisciplinary teams.

Specific recommendations with regard to areas of initial priority for scientific exploration included:

• Recognition strategies for coincident detection of elements of complex signatures.
• New materials and chemistries for recognition/sensing, and signal generation.
• Biocompatible signal amplification.
• Dynamic monitoring capabilities.
• Diagnostic feature definition and extraction tools.
• Approaches for converting generic diagnostics to generic therapeutics.