30 young researchers from 17 different universities have been participating in a full-week training school at Center for Hyperpolarization in Magnetic Resonance.
Center for Hyperpolarization in Magnetic Resonance (HYPERMAG) has experienced a 100 % increase in headcount for the past week. And what heads!
30 early stage researchers from universities in Europe, United States of America and the Middle East have all travelled to DTU in order to participate in a five-day training school on Principles and Applications of Dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization.
HYPERMAG Faculty and Organizing Committee members, Professor and Group Leader Jan Henrik Ardenkjær-Larsen, Associate Professor Pernille Rose Jensen and Researcher Sean Bowen have joined forces with external lecturers Professor Tom Wenckebach (Paul Scherrer Institute), Associate Professor Matthew E. Merritt (University of Florida, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and Group Leader Arnaud Comment (University of Cambridge, Cancer Research UK).
They have put together a program combining expert lectures with hands-on exercises, theory and in vivo/in vitro applications, as well as scientific discussion groups to support the network between these future researchers in the promising field of hyperpolarization.
The program has taken full advantage of the state-of-the-art labs of HYPERMAG, and covered topics such as DNP theory, relaxation theory, kinetic modelling, sample formulation, HyperSense and SPINlab polarizers, acquisition strategies, hardware and instrumentation, in vitro and in vivo applications and limitations.
The training school has been sponsored by ISMAR (International Society of Magnetic Resonance), GE Healthcare, Merck ISOTEC, Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, as well as HYPERMAG funder, the Danish National Research Foundation.
Lab exercises
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) are methods playing a crucial role in numerous fields of science ranging from physics and chemistry to biology and medicine. However, despite all their inherent versatility, their key issue is frequently sensitivity, which limits the applicability in the case of fast dynamic processes and detection of low abundance molecules both in vitro and in vivo.
Hyperpolarization by dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (dDNP) is a means to overcome the sensitivity problem by delivering a 10,000-fold signal enhancement and thereby enabling experiments that could not be done otherwise. In 2003 Professor Ardenkjær-Larsen published a seminal work demonstrating that DNP in the solid state at low temperature could be exploited to hyperpolarize nuclear spins in the liquid state at room temperature by rapidly dissolving the sample in a hot solvent. Although the idea appeared to be preposterous, the results were astonishing.
It has opened up many new applications in liquid state NMR and MRI and created a flourishing international research community. An opportunity for studying transient chemical reactions in real time has emerged. One of the most compelling applications of hyperpolarization is in medical imaging. Hyperpolarized Metabolic Magnetic Resonance has the potential to revolutionize diagnostic radiology by opening a window into organ and tissue metabolism at the cellular level in real-time and non-invasively. Recently the first hyperpolarized clinical trial in patients with prostate cancer was published, as well as a study of cardiac metabolism in healthy subjects.
DTU's HYPERMAG Center of Excellence was established in 2015 with funding from the Danish National Research Foundation. HYPERMAG aims to understand the science behind hyperpolarization by Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DNP) with the aim of providing a theoretical and experimental basis of the method. Our vision is to enable new vistas in medicine, biology and chemistry through Hyperpolarized Magnetic Resonance.