The €5.4 million (40m DKK) investment for the MIRAQLE project supports the development of scalable clinically deployable hyperpolarised MRI for early liver cancer diagnostics.
NVision, a quantum technology company and Denmark’s Aarhus University have secured a €5.4 million (40m DKK) grant for the MIRAQLE project under Denmark’s Grand Solutions in Quantum Technologies programme.
The award is a significant endorsement of NVision’s quantum hyperpolarisation technology and establishes a direct route for quantum-enabled diagnostics to move from the lab to the clinic.
Cancer is often detected too late. Although standard MRI scans are good at showing a tumor’s size and location they miss the metabolic activity that reveals how aggressive the disease is or whether a treatment is working.
MIRAQLE aims to change this. Researchers from the MR Research Centre at Aarhus University and NVision Imaging Technologies will develop a new type of MRI platform capable of visualising cancer metabolism. By boosting the imaging agent’s MRI signal metabolic activity can become visible during a routine MRI scan. This could make it possible to detect serious disease earlier and to monitor treatment effects far more precisely than is currently possible.
NVision’s research partnerships are rapidly expanding to cover a diverse range of medical applications. While research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre is focused on monitoring treatment efficacy in various cancers NVision’s recently established research hub at the University of Cambridge Department of Radiology allows for the exploration of both oncology and non-oncology applications including general liver disease and multiple sclerosis.
The new research project at Aarhus University builds on this momentum with a dedicated focus on liver cancer. In hepatocellular carcinoma it can be difficult for doctors to distinguish between benign changes and early-stage liver cancer often delaying diagnosis until the disease is advanced. With NVision’s technology doctors will be able to not only detect the disease earlier but also assess how aggressive it is.
“Our expanding network of research partnerships enables us to advance the use of hyperpolarised MRI across a broad spectrum of critical medical applications – from early disease detection and stratification to monitoring oncology treatments and tailoring therapies based on metabolic response,” said Professor. Myriam Chaumeil, Head of Research and MIRAQLE project lead, NVision.
“Liver cancer is a compelling application because hyperpolarised MRI can reveal the metabolic activity that drives tumor growth in real time providing insights that conventional imaging cannot offer.”
“We will be able to see how the cancer behaves not just where it is. This could change the feedback cycle from months to days making a decisive difference to when and how patients are treated,” said Professor Christoffer Laustsen, Project Leader and Head of the MR Research Centre, Aarhus University.
NVision’s proprietary technology POLARIS is based on quantum physics and can make MRI scans up to 100,000 times more sensitive than those available today. This means that even very small changes on the cellular level can be detected. At the same time the scan is carried out entirely without radioactive radiation unlike many current methods used in cancer diagnostics POLARIS.
