International Team Unlocks MRI of Cancer Agent Pyruvate with SABRE

Posted on Thursday 31 July 2025

Pyruvate is an important metabolic component, and plays a key role in many disease pathways, including cancer. Effective in vivo imaging of pyruvate would open up new possibilities in terms of diagnosing and monitoring a wide range of diseases.

Hyperpolarized (HP) MRI using [1-13C] pyruvate is quickly becoming a valuable molecular imaging approach. In this regard, a research team led by Professor Simon Duckett in York pioneered Signal Amplification By Reversible Exchange (SABRE), a method that stands out among hyperpolarization methods because it can polarize substrates directly in simple, room-temperature solutions, avoiding the need for complex hardware. However, one challenge to using SABRE in a biological or clinical setting has been its reliance on toxic solvents like methanol.

This new breakthrough, described in Angewandte Chemie, develops Ace-SABRE. This addresses the solvent challenge by using an acetone-water system to deliver injectable HP pyruvate solutions that are used for in vivo spectroscopy and imaging in hepatocellular carcinoma. The results prove comparable to those delivered by the gold standard hyperpolarisation alternative technique d-DNP, while potentially removing some of the operational complexity and difficulties with slow hyperpolarisation.
      
These new results are expected to lower the barrier to using HP-NMR and HP-MRI. In more general terms, this work potentially opens new possibilities for diagnostic MRI in a clinical setting, moving beyond just using the water signal to detect soft tissue towards the detection of other small molecules like pyruvate, which act as more specific disease markers.