"Physicians and Physicists Join Forces to Fight Pancreatic Cancer"

A team of physicians and physicists, and other scientists with differing backgrounds are engaged in a novel effort to solve the riddle of pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s most lethal malignancies. In an emerging transformation of scientific research known as convergence, experts from disparate fields pool their skills and knowledge to find answers to complex medical problems. The pancreatic-cancer convergence team features three physicians, including a leader in the burgeoning field of immuno-oncology, and three physicists, including a computational biologist. “This is the changing face of cancer research,” says Benjamin Greenbaum, PhD, a quantitative biologist and Assistant Professor at The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, also a convergence team member. “It’s no longer a guy in a white coat trying to see how many tumor cells die when you pour a chemical onto a petri dish,” he says. Learn more.