Oxygen enhanced lung MRI - towards clinical application

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"The lung is poorly served by non-ionising or low-dose imaging technologies. Thoracic CT scanning is the main technique available, but does not permit routine follow-up or longitudinal monitoring because of the unacceptably high radiation dose, especially in children.Bioxydyn Ltd is an imaging services business offering quantitative MRI biomarkers for pharma, clinical and academic clients and was spun out of the University of Manchester in 2010 with proprietary technology offering MRI in the lung known as oxygen-enhanced MRI (OE-MRI). It has provided services based on this capability to pharma since 2012, as it is known to show disease and drug effects with low patient numbers. While Bioxydyn has delivered OE-MRI for pharma clinical trials, long term ambitions are to further develop and validate the technique for imaging services customers and to drive its adoption in clinical management of respiratory diseases.Bioxydyn and its clinical partners believe that OE-MRI is capable of predicting the effectiveness of respiratory therapies much earlier than the current clinical judgements. OE-MRI has commercial benefit as a therapy selection tool, especially for expensive biologics in, for example, severe asthma. OE-MRI also has a significant opportunity to improve the management of cystic fibrosis in children. Ultimately, for commercial adoption, this needs to be proven in a clinical setting.Bioxydyn has so far optimised the image acquisition protocol, installed it on routine clinical scanners, implemented signal processing techniques in reliable software and developed quality control techniques. Most importantly, pilot data from key opinion leaders show the potential of OE-MRI to characterise disease and show therapy response (e.g. Martini et. al. 2018). These steps were achieved through a 2014 InnovateUK project and subsequent in-house efforts.This application now concerns the final pieces of development required before major multicenter studies designed to prove clinical and economic benefit.With this project Bioxydyn and its clinical lead partners will have all of the tools and data necessary to establish major multi-centre clinical trials designed to prove clinical and commercial benefit to the NHS and pharma."