Deborah Katherine Hill1,
Yann Jamin1, Nicolas Tardif1, Anne-Christine Wong Te
Fong1, Simon P. Robinson1, Harold G. Parkes1,
Matthew R. Orton1, Martin O. Leach1, Yuen-Li Chung1,
Thomas R. Eykyn1,2
1Clinical
Magnetic Resonance, CRUK & EPSRC Cancer Imaging Centre, Royal Marsden NHS
Trust & the Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton, Surrey, United Kingdom;
2Division of Imaging Sciences, the Rayne Institute, Lambeth Wing,
St.Thomas Hospital, London, United Kingdom
Signal enhancements by DNP have facilitated the interrogation of metabolic processes using 13C MRS in real-time. We demonstrate that it is possible to measure in vitro pyruvate-lactate exchange kinetics by utilising scalar couplings of methyl 1H resonances to adjacent [3-13C] labelled nuclei, without the need of hyperpolarisation. The 1H MRS-based assay measured the forward reaction rate with comparable reproducibility to the hyperpolarised 13C assay. The 1H assay has the advantage of also reliably probing the backward reaction, which has large errors in the 13C assay. Both assays detected a comparable response to treatment with Paclitaxel, a widely used chemotherapy drug.