Non-invasive molecular imaging tool for rapid, longitudinal assessment of localized metabolic disruptions in animal research and care

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PROJECT SUMMARY The cellular pathophysiology that underlies diseases, such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, begins to change long before disease symptoms become apparent. Moreover, current imaging techniques typically only visualize morphology and structure. Therefore, imaging techniques that can characterize metabolic changes have the potential to detect disease processes long before disease symptoms are pronounced. Metabolic and functional imaging thus allows much earlier diagnosis and treatment. In vivo metabolic imaging, which distinguishes changes in the chemical reactions that make up cellular processes, can be used to better understand the mechanisms underlying disease onset and progression. Current metabolic imaging techniques, such as PET and SPECT, are expensive, difficult, and not conducive for longitudinal studies due to the use of radioactive contrast agents. Therefore, the broad clinical utilization of these techniques is limited in scope. In preclinical models, other techniques, such as tissue slicing of sacrificed animals for mass spectrometry analysis, need to be employed to study cellular metabolism, resulting in a very large translational gap between preclinical animal models and clinical studies. Vizma Life Sciences has developed a novel easy-to-operate tool to prepare contrast agents that enable noninvasive, cost-saving, and repeatable in vivo preclinical imaging and is amenable to clinical translation. The tool prepares hyperpolarized metabolites that can be used as injectable contrast agents visible to conventional MRI systems. The hyperpolarized metabolites, such as [1-13C]-pyruvate, have signal-boosted spins and can be tracked in real time and report on metabolic transformations and pathways. Vizma’s tool can be easily adapted for broad use in animal facilities and in longitudinal studies in the same animals, thus reducing experimental variability and the number of animals required as the animals do not need to be sacrificed for metabolic imaging. This tool will directly improve the translation of animal research to clinical validation. The overall goal of this Phase I SBIR is to make the Vizma hyperpolarization process fully biocompatible. This involves adapting the [1-13C]-pyruvate hyperpolarization process from an alcohol-based solution to an aqueous solution, determining sensitivity limits, and then measuring residual solvent and catalyst contamination. The in vivo feasibility and safety of the technology will be examined by assessing the levels of detection of acute injections of the aqueous solution with chemical shift imaging in animals and monitoring another set of animals receiving hyperpolarized injections of the aqueous solution once a week for two weeks. Successful completion of this Phase I SBIR will result in in vivo proof-of-concept and support Phase II investigations of its use in imaging multiple animal models of disease in multiple species. The ultimate goal of this project is to commercialize this technology for broad use in preclinical and clinical settings.