Timothy Ziemlewicz
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Biomedical Engineering
Liver cancer kills many people each year, and for patients who are not candidates for surgery, destroying the tumor in place — called ablation — is one of the few options that can be curative. Current ablation methods use heat or needles, and they fail locally in roughly 10–40% of cases.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Engineering
- Topics
histotripsy
focused ultrasound
cavitation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Compare strategies for limiting breathing-related liver motion during histotripsy, testing high-frequency jet ventilation against cone-beam CT-based motion modeling that adjusts the treatment prescription.
- Determine histotripsy dose thresholds that destroy hepatocellular carcinoma while sparing critical structures such as bile ducts and bowel, first in excised tissue and then in a surviving in vivo swine liver model.
- Advance a SCID-like immunodeficient porcine liver tumor model suitable for medical device testing, in which hepatocellular carcinoma can be grown reproducibly in the liver.
- Confirm the safety and efficacy of the optimized histotripsy parameters on tumors placed in high-risk liver locations in the large animal tumor model.
More about the research
Tumors sitting next to delicate structures such as bile ducts or bowel are often left untreated because heat can injure them. Histotripsy takes a different approach: tightly focused ultrasound creates and collapses tiny bubbles inside the tumor, mechanically breaking up tissue without a needle, without heat and without radiation. Early work indicates that histotripsy spares tough collagen-rich structures like bile ducts and bowel while producing a sharp boundary between treated and untreated tissue. The central question is whether that safety advantage can be exploited without losing effectiveness, so that tumors anywhere in the liver become treatable.
Why it matters
Patients with liver cancer who cannot have surgery, especially those whose tumors sit near bile ducts or bowel and are therefore considered untreatable by heat-based ablation, could become eligible for a potentially curative, non-invasive treatment. The resulting dose and motion-management data, and the large-animal tumor model, may also support extending histotripsy to tumors of the pancreas, kidney, breast and thyroid.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Eli Vlaisavljevich
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Biomedical Engineering
Design a flat, high-frequency histotripsy array transducer with built-in high-resolution ultrasound imaging, and tune its pulse settings to destroy thyroid tissue while sparing nearby nerves and vessels.
Kenneth B. Bader
University of Chicago, IL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop and characterize a tissue phantom, a tissue-like test material, containing an imprintable mechanophore that changes chemically under force, to record the brief stresses created by ultrasound microbubbles.
Timothy Bigelow
Iowa State University, IA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether adding lower-amplitude pulses to histotripsy, an ultrasound technique that creates bubble clouds to mechanically destroy cells, reduces cavitation memory and shortens treatment of infected hernia mesh, and measure how exposures affect mesh properties.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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