Imaging of glucose metabolism by 13C-MRI distinguishes pancreatic cancer subtypes in mice
Abstract
Metabolic differences among and within tumors can be an important determinant in cancer treatment outcome. However, methods for determining these differences non-invasively in vivo is lacking. Using pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma as a model, we demonstrate that tumor xenografts with a similar genetic background can be distinguished by their differing rates of the metabolism of 13C labeled glucose tracers, which can be imaged without hyperpolarization using newly developed techniques for noise suppression. Using this method, cancer subtypes that appeared to have similar metabolic profiles based on steady state metabolic measurement can be distinguished from each other. The metabolic maps from 13C-glucose imaging localized lactate production and overall glucose metabolism to different regions of some tumors. Such tumor heterogeneity was not detectable in FDG-PET.
Data availability
Glucose imaging data and related files have been deposited to Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XU9XH9
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Cancer Institute (1ZIASC006321-39)
- James Mitchell
National Cancer Institute (Intramural Research Program)
- Murali C Krishna
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Ralph DeBerardinis, UT Southwestern Medical Center, United States
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The animal experiments were conducted according to a protocol approved by the Animal Research Advisory Committee of the NIH (RBB-159-2SA) in accordance with the National Institutes of Health Guidelines for Animal Research.
Version history
- Received: February 23, 2019
- Accepted: August 8, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: August 13, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: August 22, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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