Active Brain & Nervous System Lungs & Breathing

Hyperpolarised 129Xe Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopic Brain Oximetry

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Recipient organisation University of Sheffield
Funding £1.9M
Period Oct 2024 — Oct 2030

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A brain imaging method that tracks inhaled xenon gas could reveal whether the brain is getting enough oxygen—and flag early signs of cognitive decline decades before symptoms appear. Brain blood flow drops naturally with age, but no one knows exactly when this leads to dangerously low oxygen levels in brain tissue. This fellowship aims to answer that question by reverse-engineering a non-invasive MRI technique that follows the uptake of hyperpolarised 129Xe gas into the brain. The researcher will first test the method in animals, inducing acute and chronic hypoxia while making direct oxygen measurements and manipulating blood flow with drugs. This will clarify whether the 129Xe signal truly reflects brain oxygen levels—a gap the physicists who pioneered the technique in Sheffield have not yet filled. If the method proves sensitive and reproducible across different MRI scanners, it could become a midlife biomarker for poor brain health. That would allow clinicians to identify people at risk of neurodegeneration long before memory loss begins, opening a window for early intervention. Currently, no routine test measures brain oxygen directly; this would be the first.

View original technical description
Reductions in brain blood flow are the earliest biomarker of cognitive decline and neurodegeneration. Brain perfusion declines during ageing (Christie 2022) yet the relationship between brain blood flow and hypoxia is not well understood. The aim of this fellowship is to perform a detailed investigation of a brain imaging method, to determine whether this method is sensitive to brain oxygen and useful as a midlife biomarker for poor brain health. I propose to reverse translate a non-invasive quantitative, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method which follows the uptake of 129Xe gas into the brain. First, in laboratory animals, I will simulate acute and chronic hypoxia while collecting 129Xe MRI data from the brain, simultaneously making invasive oxygen measurements from the brain and manipulating cerebral perfusion with pharmacology. 129Xe brain imaging was pioneered by physicists in Sheffield and is safe for humans (Rao 2019). However, the physiological sensitivity of the method is unclear; this proposal addresses this knowledge gap. After the key goal is addressed, pre-clinical and human scans will be performed on second MRI scanners to validate the reproducibility of the method. The ultimate goal is to validate a new biomarker of brain health and metabolic deficit in the human brain.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Isabel Christie (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Next generation MRI technologies for measuring brain oxygen metabolism
Highly sensitive brain blood flow measurements using ultra-high field magnetic resonance imaging
Quantitative functional MRI: developing non-invasive neuroimaging to map the human brain's consumption of oxygen
The development of 129Xe polarisation optimised MRI techniques for functional lung imaging.
Development of preclinical imaging to refine studies of dysfunctional blood flow in the brain

Original classification

Career Development Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.