MRI to Replace Biopsies Using a Sweet New Technique

Normal cells (left) have far more sugar attached to mucin proteins than do cancerous cells (right). Mucin-attached sugar generates a high MRI signal, shown in red. Credit: Xiaolei Song/Johns Hopkins Medicine

While CT scans and other non-invasive imaging modalities are able to spot suspect lesions, they’re not able to differentiate between benign tissue and cancerous tumors. A new MRI technique being studied at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine may one day allow MRI scans to be used instead of biopsies.

The Hopkins researchers focused on the fact that once healthy cells turn cancerous they release sugars from their outer membranes. This is done by specific proteins within the membranes, so focusing the MRI signal to detect sugars stuck to only those proteins may serve as a biomarker for a growing cancer.

The technique does not require a contrast agent, but does need quite a bit of fine tuning. Nevertheless, the team was able to quantify sugar levels on mucin proteins, demonstrating that those levels are markedly lower in cancerous cells compared to healthy ones. Their research was just published in the journal Nature Communications.

Study in Nature Communications: Label-free in vivo molecular imaging of underglycosylated ​mucin-1 expression in tumour cells…

Source: Johns Hopkins…