The technology at the heart of the award is remarkable in its simplicity and its audacity. Histotripsy uses focused ultrasound waves, delivered from outside the body, to create microscopic bubbles in targeted tissue. These bubbles form and collapse in rapid cycles, generating mechanical forces that liquefy and destroy the targeted cells with millimeter precision, all without a single incision. Unlike thermal ablation methods that burn or freeze tissue, histotripsy destroys tumors mechanically, sparing surrounding blood vessels, nerves and healthy structures and producing few side effects. Patients typically recover quickly because there is no surgical wound to heal. Since the technique received authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of liver tumors in 2023, it has moved rapidly from the laboratory into clinics around the world, offering a glimpse of what noninvasive cancer care might look like in the decades ahead.

The commercial engine behind that clinical expansion is HistoSonics, a University of Michigan startup that Xu and a small group of U-M engineers and doctors founded in 2009 to translate the laboratory discovery into a viable medical platform. The company’s trajectory illustrates how long the road from basic discovery to patient benefit can be, and how unlikely that road looks at its start. By June of this year, HistoSonics had reached a valuation of $3.75 billion and now employs roughly 500 people, with offices in Ann Arbor and corporate headquarters in Minnesota. More than 130 of the company’s treatment systems have been installed around the world, and those systems have already been used to treat more than 5,000 patients. For a technology that early-stage investors once dismissed as too speculative to fund, those numbers represent an extraordinary vindication.

Xu is emphatic that none of it would have happened without sustained federal support. In the years before histotripsy could attract private capital, funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense carried the research through its most uncertain phase, she explained. The early research and development of such a new, disruptive technology was viewed as too high a risk for investors and companies, such that funding from industry or investors could not be secured early on, Xu said. The initial research on histotripsy, as well as its early development for the treatment of cancer, brain diseases and cardiovascular diseases, was largely funded by the NIH. Government funding, she said, was the only way to establish a solid research foundation and advance the technology until it was ready for commercialization, allowing a small academic team to pursue a question that no one else was willing to underwrite.

That message resonates deeply with the mission of the Golden Goose Awards, which were first awarded in 2012 specifically to counter the narrative of wasteful federal spending on science. The awards deliberately spotlight research projects whose initial goals may have sounded obscure, odd or even frivolous, but which went on to produce discoveries of enormous practical value. Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the Science family of journals, framed the award in exactly those terms. Part of the nation’s scientific and economic leadership starts with giving researchers the freedom to follow promising ideas, even when no one knows exactly where they will lead, Parikh said. This year’s Golden Goose awardees, he argued, demonstrate why that freedom matters.

Parikh’s argument extends beyond any single discovery to the structure of the scientific enterprise itself. Some of the most consequential discoveries, he noted, began with questions whose value was far from obvious at the outset, and sustained federal investment ensures that scientists can keep asking those questions and pursuing unexpected discoveries that make people healthier, safer and more competitive. Histotripsy is a case study in that principle at work. The fundamental physics of bubble dynamics in tissue had no obvious commercial endpoint when Xu and her colleagues began their work, and had the research been judged solely on near-term market potential, it would almost certainly have died in its infancy. Instead, federal grants allowed a long arc of exploratory science to unfold at its own pace, eventually producing a platform that now treats thousands of patients annually.

Xu’s ambitions for the technology extend far beyond the liver tumors for which it is currently authorized. Even though histotripsy is currently FDA-approved to treat tumors in the liver, she describes it as a platform technology that can be used to treat many diseases, including a wide range of cancer types, with tumors in the kidney, pancreas, breast, prostate, thyroid, skin and sarcoma among the potential targets. Beyond oncology, she sees applications in brain diseases such as hemorrhagic stroke, brain tumors and epilepsy. Perhaps most intriguingly, she points to the possibility of combining histotripsy with cancer drugs and immunotherapy to treat some advanced cancer types that currently have no cure, since mechanically disrupting a tumor may help therapeutic agents reach and attack cancer cells more effectively. Each of these directions remains under active investigation, and none is yet an approved use of the technology.

To accelerate that expansion, Xu directs the University of Michigan Histotripsy Center, a first-of-its-kind research institution that launched earlier this month with roughly $10 million in support. The center’s explicit mission is to rapidly discover more cancers and other diseases that may be treatable with focused ultrasound, shortening the path from laboratory hypothesis to clinical trial. By concentrating expertise in ultrasound physics, biomedical engineering, immunology and clinical medicine under one roof, the center aims to systematically map the boundaries of what mechanical tissue ablation can achieve. If the history of histotripsy is any guide, some of the questions pursued there will sound improbable today, and some of them will prove to matter enormously.

Xu shares this year’s Golden Goose Award with two other groups of researchers whose unlikely-seeming projects produced outsized benefits. One team’s work led to NASA’s Black Marble program, which can track power outages in real time from space, giving responders and utilities an unprecedented view of infrastructure failures during disasters. The other honoree is University of Chicago physicist Sidney Nagel, whose investigations into the physics behind complex everyday phenomena have led to improvements in medical diagnostics, inkjet printing and industrial processes. Taken together, the 2026 cohort of awardees reads like a catalog of research directions that a cost-benefit analysis would once have cut: sound waves that shred tumors, satellites that see blacked-out cities, and the slow-motion physics of a coffee drop.

For Xu, the recognition is also a statement about the ecosystem that makes such science possible. She and the University of Michigan hold a financial interest in HistoSonics, a disclosure that underscores how federal seed funding helped create not only a medical technology but a thriving company and hundreds of jobs in Michigan and Minnesota. The larger lesson, she suggests, is that patience is a form of investment. A therapy that destroys tumors with sound, without surgery and with few side effects, was never an overnight success; it was a federally funded question that stubborn researchers kept asking until the answer changed what medicine can do. As more than 5,000 patients can now attest, the questions least obvious in value at the outset are sometimes the ones most worth funding.

Subject of Research: Noninvasive focused ultrasound cancer treatment and federal funding of exploratory biomedical research

Article Title: U-M's Zhen Xu wins Golden Goose Award for development of noninvasive cancer treatment

Article References: U-M's Zhen Xu wins Golden Goose Award for development of noninvasive cancer treatment. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: histotripsy, Zhen Xu, Golden Goose Award, focused ultrasound, HistoSonics, cancer treatment, noninvasive surgery, University of Michigan, AAAS, NIH funding, FDA authorization, medical ultrasound