Objective

Molecular imaging is likely to play an increasingly important role in detecting tumour responses to treatment, which could be used in early stage clinical trials to get an initial indication of drug efficacy and subsequently in the clinic for guiding treatment in individual patients (1). We have been developing imaging methods for detecting the early responses of tumours to therapy, which has included a targeted imaging agent for detecting tumour cell death2 and metabolic imaging with hyperpolarized 13C-labelled substrates, which we have used to detect tumour treatment response, to monitor disease progression and to investigate the tumour microenvironment (reviewed in (3)). Nuclear spin hyperpolarization increases sensitivity in the 13C magnetic resonance experiment by >10,000x, which has allowed imaging of injected hyperpolarized 13C labelled cell substrates in vivo and the kinetics of their metabolic conversion into other cell metabolites. 1. Brindle, K. New approaches for imaging tumour responses to treatment. Nature Rev Cancer 8, 94-107 (2008). 2. Neves, A.A., et al. Rapid Imaging of Tumor Cell Death In Vivo Using the C2A Domain of Synaptotagmin-I. J Nucl Med 58, 881-887 (2017). 3. Brindle, K.M. Imaging Metabolism with Hyperpolarized 13C-Labeled Cell Substrates. J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 137, 6418-6427 (2015)