Feature
SEEING THE INVISIBLE Being able to see deep inside an object with chemical selectivity would have implications across a wide spectrum of applications. The ability to detect cancer could be such a ground-breaking step forward.
A Southampton research project to advance the capabilities of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is on the road to major breakthroughs that will have the potential to influence everything from fundamental physics to physical medicine. The project is called Functionalised Magnetic Resonance Beacons for Enhanced Spectroscopy and Imaging, or FunMagResBeacons for short. Malcolm Levitt, Professor of Physical Chemistry, is leading the six-year project. He explained: “This project is about some new frontier advances in NMR which can enhance the signal strength, or the brightness of the signals, for NMR and MRI by very large factors – up to 100,000 times. We’re using a phenomenon called hyperpolarisation, which is being developed fairly intensively around the world, including by us in Southampton.
24
“This project is specifically about developing chemical agents and techniques involving applying pulses of magnetic fields and so on, in order that these bright signals appear in the presence for example of a molecule you would like to detect.” Detecting enzymes The ability to detect certain types of cancer is just one potential outcome of the project. To do that, the advances being made will be able to detect a particular enzyme. Malcolm said: “The cancer cells are attached to a matrix of tissue in the body and they produce a certain enzyme which allows the cells to cut away from the tissue and then float away in the bloodstream and metastasize. That’s how cancer manages to infect other parts of the body. “We would like to find a way to detect this enzyme as that would enable the possibility
“ This project is specifically about developing chemical agents and techniques involving applying pulses of magnetic fields and so on, in order that these bright signals appear in the presence for example of a molecule you would like to detect.” Malcolm Levitt Professor of Physical Chemistry
