The Advanced Imaging Research Center (AIRC) on the campus of UT Southwestern Medical Center has a team of engineers, physicists, chemists, and clinicians focused on translating hyperpolarized 13C tracers of metabolism from preclinical animal models of disease to human patients. Our current DNP polarizer , the HyperSense, is now 12 years old and for the past 2 years, we have experienced long non-operational periods, often months at a time due to lack of parts and service from Oxford Instruments and an inconsistent liquid helium supply during certain times of the year. This S10 proposal is to request support for the purchase of a newly designed, liquid helium-free, pre-clinical DNP polarizer called the SpinAligner. This polarizer is fundamentally important to this Unversity?s hyperpolarized 13C metabolic imaging program. Twenty two individual investigators (8 Major Users and 14 Minor Users) have NIH funded projects described in this application that will be impacted by the SpinAligner. The development of a new pre-clinical imaging space that consists of the SpinAligner sitting next to a new helium-free 3T pre-clinical MR scanner (University commitment) will dramatically catalyze our productivity in developing new probes to study metabolism in a variety of animal models of human disease.
A new approach to clinical MR imaging is based on exciting simple molecules just before injection into patients. The development of new molecules for human imaging requires safety and feasibility studies in rodents. This application requests support for a device, the SpinAligner, to perform these preclinical studies and to evaluate the new molecules designed and synthesized in our lab.
