Two faculty members in the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging recently received funding from National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Cancer Institute (NCI) for an exciting research project to study hyperpolarized (HP) carbon-13 (13C) metabolic MRI in prostate cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy (RT).
Robert Bok MD, PhD and Daniel Vigneron PhD are PI's of the project and were awarded a five-year, R01 grant titled "Hyperpolarized C-13 MRI Techniques to Monitor Radiation Therapy Response in Prostate Cancer Patients." Drs. Bok and Vigneron will collaborate with Anthony Wong MD, PhD, faculty member with the UCSF Department of Radiation Oncology to study the application of HP 13C MRI for the first time to evaluate the metabolic response of human prostate tumors to RT.
"This clinical project builds on previous preclinical and clinical work performed at UCSF," says Dr. Vigneron. "Preclinical investigations on HP 13C MRI in a transgenic murine model of prostate cancer demonstrated the ability of this fast, non-radioactive, metabolic imaging technology to rapidly detect key physiological responses of prostate tumors to RT."