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Online IBEC Seminar: Irene Marco
Friday, December 10, 2021 @ 10:00 am–12:00 pm
Updates on a new lab at IBEC: hyperpolarised magnetic resonance for real-time, in situ monitoring of cell metabolism
Irene Marco, Molecular Imaging for Precision Medicine group at IBEC
There is a clinical need for non-invasive and reliable markers to diagnose, stage and evaluate treatment response in many diseases such as cancer or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Magnetic resonance (MR) methods now have the potential to revolutionise in the identification of such biomarkers in real time. Spectroscopic identification and quantitation of metabolites via carbon-13 chemical shifts can be combined with imaging (MRI) to simultaneously probe spatial (biodistribution) and temporal (kinetics) aspects of metabolism in vivo. These capabilities are enabled by so-called hyperpolarised (HP) MR techniques, including Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation (DNP), which can transiently boost the carbon-13 MR signals by several orders of magnitude, compared to traditional methods. DNP enables real-time measurement of enzymatic reactions in cell suspensions and in vivo. Multiple HP 13C-labelled substrates have provided insights in several metabolic pathways, including glycolysis, the pentose-phosphate pathway and the cellular redox state. I will present the potential of DNP to study metabolism in cell suspensions, tissue ex vivo and animals in vivo. Also, I will talk about the progress we have made at IBEC in the past couple of months and how we plan to implement HP MR to monitor metabolism in organs-in-chips.
This seminar will be held at Tower I, 11th floor Baobab room, there will be 30 avialable seats, the free spots will be assigned on a first come first served basis. If you wish to attend this seminar online, please write to ibeccommunications@ibecbarcelona.eu.
More information about Irene Marco’s research here
