B06 - Parahydrogen hyperpolarization to quantify low concentration metabolites for early disease diagnosis

Diagnosis is fundamental to treatment of all diseases. In cases where the disease progression is fast (like in aggressive infectious diseases), the importance of early detection is even greater despite the concentration of indicative biomarkers (e.g. metabolites) being low. An example disease facing such challenges is tuberculosis (TB). According to the WHO, each year more than 10 million people fall ill with TB. Despite TB being a curable disease about 1.5 million afflicted victims die. This makes TB the world’s number one infectious killer, surpassing COVID-19, which famously rushed to 2nd place recently. Considering that both the infection as well as the disease are curable, this warrants the question why it has not been eliminated. The main reasons for this are simply the success rate and rapidity of diagnosis.

Thus, to achieve early TB diagnosis, project B06 aims to develop a platform based on the metabolite pattern of urine in a hyperpolarized NMR spectrum. The project brings the concept of parahydrogen based hyperpolarization into HyPERiON and with that adds to the vision of small, affordable, and sensitive NMR spectroscopy.

Team