ECLIPSE: Unveiling Brain Tumor Metabolism with Advanced In Vivo MRI

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We know that brain tumors thrive by rewiring energy pathways and that lactate is at the center of this metabolic shift. However, without knowing how brain tumors make, use, move, and remove lactate, we cannot fully understand the biology that drives their growth.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is the clinical standard for diagnosing and monitoring brain tumors. Conventional MRI provides excellent structural detail but little metabolic information, and each current metabolic MRI method can capture only a part of the metabolic picture. No imaging method can fully quantify the fates of lactate in vivo, which leaves fundamental questions unanswered about how tumors produce, consume, import, and clear lactate and limits our ability to develop reliable metabolic biomarkers for therapy response.

ECLIPSE will establish the first integrated, multi-modal MRI platform to quantify all major lactate pathways in brain tumor patients: steady-state lactate levels, lactate production, oxidative flux, lactate uptake, and clearance. The project will advance and integrate complementary MRI-based techniques: hyperpolarized ¹³C-MRSI to measure lactate production, Deuterium Metabolic Imaging (DMI) to quantify oxidation and clearance, high-resolution ¹H-MRSI for lactate uptake and metabolite pool sizes, and ³¹P-MT-MRSI for energy turnover. This will be the first time that these techniques are combined to measure brain tumors. The patient data will be integrated into a mathematical model to provide quantitative, pathway-specific flux maps, enabling dynamic and comprehensive assessment of brain tumor metabolism in vivo.

By moving beyond isolated measurements to comprehensive mapping of metabolic flux, ECLIPSE will provide a new framework for studying tumor metabolism in vivo. The resulting methodology will not only transform the evaluation of brain tumors but will also inspire broader applications in other cancers and neurological diseases where altered metabolism plays a key role.