Danish technology and natural sciences magazine Ingeniøren has published an article on Friday 22 December 2017, describing the potential of Hyperpolarized Magnetic Resonance Imaging and the process behind achieving hyperpolarization: https://ing.dk/artikel/ny-teknologi-lyn-evaluerer-kraeftbehandling-209530 (in Danish).
The article features an interview with Professor Hans Stødkilde-Jørgensen from Aarhus University Hospital's MR Center, which will be the first Danish and sixth hospital in the world to start clinical studies of Hyperpolarized Magnetic Resonance Imaging, this time on patients with pancreatic cancer. It is the hope that the method can enable doctors to determine the efficacy of a patient's cancer treatment quickly after treatment instead of - as now - having to wait for precious weeks before maybe having to conclude that treatment has little effect and start up a new regime.
The article includes an interview with Professor Jan Henrik Ardenkjær-Larsen, inventor of dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization, one of three methods to achieve hyperpolarization. Dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization is the most versatile method to hyperpolarize injectable solutions of bioprobes central to cellular metabolism. These bioprobes allow doctors to study non-invasively (without biopsy) the alterations in the biochemical processes in the diseased cells before and after treatment, and as such may offer within minutes a direct window into the condition of a patient's cancerous cells, eg. in the case of monitoring the efficacy of cancer treatment in patients.
Professor Jan Henrik Ardenkjær-Larsen is the Leader of Center for Hyperpolarization in Magnetic Resonance (HYPERMAG), a Center of Excellence at DTU funded by Danish National Research Foundation.
HYPERMAG is focused on key scientific questions that will enable a better understanding and control of the hyperpolarized magnetic resonance signal and new ways to extract valuable data from it. Potential high-value application areas include medicine, but also chemistry and biology.
HYPERMAG collaborates with hospitals around the world. The picture above is an example of HYPERMAG research in pre-clinical test. It shows
PhD student Rie Beck Hansen's scan set-up from an external research stay at University of California San Francisco earlier in 2017 - a Carbon-13 abdominal scan setup with multi-channel receive coil for sequence and coil testing using a custom-made phantom. The phantom contains natural abundance ethylene glycol and carbon-13-enriched substrates, and can be used to test the performance of her technological development.