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EUPHORIA: Establishing a Uk and euroPean HyperpOlarised magnetic Resonance Imaging pArtnership

Funder MRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation
Funding £1.1M
Period Mar 2025 — Mar 2028

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A UK-European consortium is joining forces to standardise and scale up hyperpolarised Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a technique that makes MRI scans dramatically more sensitive to metabolic activity. Standard MRI shows anatomy—tumours, torn ligaments, blocked vessels. Hyperpolarised MRI goes further: it tracks real-time chemical reactions inside the body, such as how a tumour consumes glucose or whether a treatment is working, within minutes. But the technique is technically demanding, and results vary between centres. This partnership tackles that gap by testing how reproducible the method is across different hospitals and scanners, and by training the next generation of staff and students to use it reliably. If the partnership succeeds, hyperpolarised MRI could move from a handful of specialist labs into routine clinical use. That would give doctors a non-invasive way to monitor treatment response in cancer, heart disease, and other conditions—potentially sparing patients unnecessary biopsies or ineffective therapies. The work also has industrial and economic impact: companies developing hyperpolarisation equipment and contrast agents gain a trained workforce and validated protocols, reducing costly trial-and-error in staff development. The ultimate change is a more personalised, faster, and less invasive form of medical imaging that quietly reshapes how disease is diagnosed and tracked.

View original technical description
This partnership brings together the major UK and European stakeholders from academia and industry to provide the foundation for the advancement of our field, hyperpolarised Magnetic Resonance Imaging, with the broader vision to benefit human health on a global scale. Our partnership aims to foster a collaborative venture that will be a bedrock for future pan-UK and European multi-centre research aimed at benefiting patients, and therefore wider society. Our field sits at a pivotal moment whereby engaging in a multi-centre collaborative initiative to expand educational opportunities to upskill staff and students, and to assess the cross-centre reliability of our technique, are key to unlock huge benefits for years to come. Benefits from this partnership will be felt in the technological, industrial, economic, and healthcare sectors. The partnership aims to bring further technological advances to medical imaging, through the direct assessment of the reliability of our powerful imaging technology. Industry will benefit from the direct engagement in the educational venture, providing upskilling of staff and new employees, thus reducing ‘wasted’ hours of staff development. The economic benefit will be felt through the increased investment in UK and European medical research using our technology to read out disease and treatment response in numerous pathologies. Finally, healthcare sectors, specifically individual patients, will benefit from this step toward personalised medical care using highly sensitive, reliable, hyperpolarised Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Dorothee Auer (Co-Investigator)James Grist (Principal Investigator)Mary McLean (Co-Investigator)Sebastien Serres (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Research and Innovation

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