Systemic Delivery of Divalent Europium from Ligand Screening with Implications to Direct Imaging of Hypoxia.

Hypoxia is a hallmark of many diseases, including cancer, arthritis, heart and kidney diseases, and diabetes, and it is often associated with disease aggressiveness and poor prognosis. Consequently, there is a critical need for imaging hypoxia in a noninvasive and direct way to diagnose, stage, and monitor the treatment and development of new therapies for these diseases. Eu-containing contrast agents for magnetic resonance imaging have demonstrated potential for in vivo imaging of hypoxia via changes in metal oxidation state from +2 to +3, but rapid oxidation in blood limits Eu-containing complexes to studies compatible with direct injection to sites.

Summary of Imaging in 2020: Visualizing the Future of Healthcare with MR Imaging.

The Imaging in 2020 meeting convenes biannually to discuss innovations in medical imaging. The 2018 meeting, titled "Visualizing the Future of Healthcare with MR Imaging," sought to encourage discussions of the future goals of MRI research, feature important discoveries, and foster scientific discourse between scientists from a variety of fields of expertise. Here, we highlight presented research and resulting discussions of the meeting.

Photophysical characterization of a highly luminescent divalent-europium-containing azacryptate.

We report a new luminescent EuII-containing complex. The complex is excited with visible light, leading to emission centered at 447 nm with a lifetime of 1.25 μs.

Screening of ligands for redox-active europium using magnetic resonance imaging.

We report a screening procedure to predict ligand coordination to Eu and Eu using magnetic resonance imaging in which bright images indicate complexation and dark images indicate no complexation. Here, paramagnetic Gd is used as a surrogate for Eu in the screening procedure to enable detection with magnetic resonance imaging. The screening procedure was tested using a set of eight ligands with known coordination to Eu and Eu, and results were found to be consistent with expected binding.