Signal-enhanced MRI contrast agents for neurodegeneration

Despite decades of research, neurodegenerative diseases remain challenging to diagnose and identify on time.

At the point external symptoms, such as memory or motor deficits become evident, the patient has usually suffered irreparable neuronal damage.

This not only decreases life quality and expectancy of the patient, but also severely limits our ability to design new effective treatments and apply existing ones in a timely manner. A promising approach for early diagnosis could be the visualisation of metabolic changes in the brain. There are specific differences in the points of origin for different neurodegenerative diseases.

The fact that the metabolism of neurons change when they are exposed to internal or external stressors, makes detecting changes in the metabolism of specific brain regions in comparison to the rest of the organ a possible powerful tool to early diagnose the onset of neurodegeneration.

During the course of my ERC starting grant my team and I have developed new magnetic resonance technologies and contrast agents based on body own metabolites.

These metabolic contrast agents can not only visualize overall metabolism of observed tissues but also show differences in the rate of resulting metabolites, further increasing the potential diagnostic accuracy.

Before the developments made in my ERC project, especially a fast and simple approach to obtain such contrast agents was out of reach.

In first experiments we provided evidence that my approach can be used to detect the onsets of Parkinsons disease, one severe neurodegenerative illness.With the project outlined in this PoC we now aim to determine the feasibility of our technology as a clinical solution and a business opportunity, to enable timely, straight forward, fast and non-invasive diagnosis for neurodegenerative diseases.

The success of this project will be the first important step to bring our technology into the clinics and improve patients health on a global scale in the future.