DYNUPOL, INC. — Department of Health and Human Services SBIR Phase II: NCI

Description

Current clinical magnetic resonance metabolic imaging techniques are severely hindered by poor sensitivity Dynamic nuclear polarization solves this problem by transferring polarization from the highly polarized electron spins of a polarization agent to the nuclear spins of the target MRI probe The metabolite dehydroascorbic acid DHA has been shown to be an excellent hyperpolarized probe of cellular redox capacity providing a measure of the cells ability to quench reactive oxygen species ROS Pre clinical studies have demonstrated hyperpolarized DHA s ability to measure increased reducing capacity in cancer and diabetes induced renal oxidative stress and their response to therapy and it s anticipated to have broad applicability to a variety of diseases With the successful clinical translation of C MRI of hyper polarized C pyruvate the use of HP C DHA in patients is being actively pursued However the spatiotemporal resolution of HP C DHA is severely hampered by the relatively poor polarization that is being obtained using the current trityl based polarization radicals Additionally broad use of HP DHA is limited by the high cost of the trityl radicals A Phase I effort will focus on increasing DHA s polarization by fold with Dynupol s polarization agents enabling higher resolution and sensitivity in cellular redox imaging of a variety of diseases