Each day in the U.S., more than 80 million medical imaging scans are performed, many for patients with cancer. While physicians traditionally review and interpret these images to guide individual care, innovators like Daphne Haas-Kogan, MD, MBA, chair of the Brigham’s Department of Radiation Oncology, are devising ways to bring scans into massive data sets that artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze to identify potential avenues of care.

The William M. Wood Foundation, Bank of America, N.A., Co-Trustee, is a longtime champion of Haas-Kogan, who recently assumed the combined role of chair of radiation oncology at the Brigham and Massachusetts General Hospital, as well as chief of enterprise radiation oncology for Mass General Brigham. With their latest $2 million grant, the foundation has contributed $6 million cumulatively to the Brigham’s Cancer Precision Trials Initiative, an effort to create personalized radiation oncology treatments.

Led by Haas-Kogan, the initiative uses AI, drug development, and clinical trials to bring tailored therapies to patients with a wide range of cancers, including gastrointestinal, pancreatic, brain, gynecologic, breast, head and neck, prostate, thoracic, and pediatric cancers.

“We’ve been deeply impressed and inspired by Dr. Haas-Kogan’s vision and the goals she’s articulated for the Cancer Precision Trials Initiative,” says Emma Greene, Bank of America managing director and philanthropic client director. “This grant funding aims to help her team make groundbreaking scientific progress and create the best possible outcomes for patients facing cancer.”

The foundation’s latest grant will bolster the initiative’s efforts to develop new drugs for highly aggressive brain cancers in adults and children and expand AI analyses to further personalize care and maximize cure rates. It will also help to develop large, multi-center clinical trials that build on the Brigham’s international expertise in MR-guided radiation therapy and nanoparticle treatments.

“Our first priority is to make new scientific discoveries that benefit patients with cancer,” says Haas-Kogan, the Hees Family Professor of Radiation Oncology. “With great credit to the Wood Foundation, we will achieve this by leveraging new tools and technologies, and by sharing what we learn with healthcare teams and patients here in the Boston medical community, across the country, and around the world.”