IBEC Seminar: Irene Marco

Hyperpolarised magnetic resonance for real-time, in situ monitoring of cell metabolism

Irene Marco, Biosensors for bioengineering – 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, as well as tap on the advances into the clinical translation of the technique. Also, I will talk about how we intend to implement HP MR to monitor metabolism in organs-in-chips in the lab of Javier Ramón (IBEC).

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