Fewer biopsies and faster MRIs That's the promise of a new technique developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley.
When you lie in an MRI machine, Magnetic Resonance Imaging uses powerful magnets to align certain nuclei in your body, like spinning tops all standing up straight. Next, they are shot with a radio signal. They wobble, then return the radio signal as they straighten up. The radio signal tells us where they are, and the time it takes them to “un-wobble” tells us what kind of molecules are in the neighborhood.
The bad news is that this takes a long time, and it’s not very precise. But teams working in the labs of Alexander Pines David Wemmer have improved on this process in two ways.
The new technique is faster, because it listens for xenon molecules instead of hydrogen. Typically, because there is so much hydrogen in living things, an MRI works with the hydrogen nucleus. But xenon gives a much stronger signal for a longer time - made thousands of times faster by a clever chemical process devised by the researchers.
The new method is more sensitive, because the researchers devised a way to enclose xenon molecules in tiny chemical cages. Those cages can be made to attach themselves to whatever kind of molecule you want. These biosensors are sensitive enough to locate smaller tumors, even individual cancer cells. And more than one kind of cell at the same time. Furthermore, for the first time, they can control the sensitivity by controlling the temperature of the cages.
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