Cancer Center at Illinois

The Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) unites historic campus strengths in basic science and engineering to develop new ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat cancer, enabling people to live cancer-free lives. The CCIL is the cancer-focused hub of a highly integrated campus research ecosystem and aims to develop next-generation technologies to improve cancer care. It currently has more than 75 full members spanning over a dozen campus departments.

Cancer Center members work across disciplines and traditional academic silos to develop novel, cancer-focused science and technology, translate that technology into practice, and educate students, professional researchers, clinicians, and members of the public in cancer research-related topics. The CCIL is focused on scientific and technological breakthroughs. CCIL members have developed medical drugs and devices that are currently in clinical trials or in use in the clinic right now.

CCIL research is organized into two programs, each with three research themes:

1. Cancer Measurement Technology and Data Science Program

• Next Generation Imaging
• Technology for Precision Medicine
• Computational Biology

2. Cancer Discovery Platforms Bridging the Engineering-Biology Continuum

• Pathways and Mechanisms
• Targeted Drug Discovery
• Engineered and Natural Model Systems