Enhanced Optical Module to Enable Polarized 129Xe MRI Use in Clinical Trials

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): There are now 50+ new drugs in Phase II-III development to treat COPD - a disease affecting 13 million Americans, costing 49B and killing 120,000 each year. However, a major limitation in evaluating therapies for thesechronic diseases is the lack of a sufficiently sensitive and non-invasive method for drug developers to see efficacy on timescales of days rather than months. Without such methods, expensive drug development programs fail, and promising new drugs are never put into trials. An emerging solution is hyperpolarized 129Xe MRI, which is an extraordinarily powerful marker of regional pulmonary function and therapy response. However, its availability in major pulmonary centers is currently limited. Our long-term goal is to build a business that can broadly deploy non-invasive, high-resolution hyperpolarized 129Xe MRIs as a biomarker to help accelerate evaluation of promising therapies for respiratory diseases. The objective of this application is to improve t