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. “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 of localising the cancer and prevent it from breaking away into other parts of the body. One of the aims of this project is to find a way of imaging the locations when this enzyme is found by using these very bright NMR or MRI signals.”

Cancer is just one example of the potential influence this research project could have. Another example could be detecting changes in acidity, as the potential is there to develop agents which appear bright in regions of high acidity.

Halfway point

The FunMagResBeacons team is halfway through the six-year, €2.76 million project. It’s being funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council, and is the second Advanced Grant Malcolm has won.

He said: “To get to the point we’re at now where we can start to develop the technique, we had to develop a much deeper understanding of some of the phenomena we are trying to exploit. We found some unexpected issues which are very interesting from the perspective of our research field, and we found that some of the standard knowledge in the field proved to not be correct. Since we are exploring the hyperpolarised states, which are unusual, we came upon some phenomena which we did not expect and it has taken time to resolve this.”

The research team, which also includes Professor Lynda Brown, Postdoctoral Research Fellows Christian Bengs, Mohamed Sabba, Gamal Moustafa, Soumya Singha Roy, Jyrki Rantaharju and Laurynas Dagys, Graduate student Jamie Whipham, and Research Engineer Weidong Gong, is now focusing on optimising the hyperpolarised experiments.

“We have enhanced NMR signals, so that part of the project has been proceeding well,” said Malcolm. “We will make substantial progress before the end of the project. I don’t think we will be detecting cancer by the end, but we will be providing the tools to enable that to be done.”

The potential outcomes of the project would have exciting implications that could benefit us all.

“It’s a great thing to have this team working on a very ambitious and difficult project,” added Malcolm. “It’s a project that, if we do pull it off, would very fulfilling on a personal level and might have real world applications. Despite my long career in the field, which has been successful on an academic level, I haven’t developed anything that directly benefits people, so it’s a real dream to do the good science and at the same time do something of benefit to the wider community.”