Fluorine Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Eric T. Ahrens is a professor of radiology at the University of California San Diego and the director of Stem Cell Molecular Imaging at the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, California, USA. His research focuses on adapting non-invasive imaging methods to visualize specific cell populations in the body. He has pioneered MRI-based cell-tracking materials and methods that have been adopted by numerous investigators worldwide. Innovations by his laboratory include the synthesis of functionalized perfluorocarbon-based nanoemulsion probes for sensitive MRI, PET, and fluorescence detection. He led a team that developed a novel clinical perfluorocarbon 19F MRI cell-tracking agent and performed first-in-human studies to visualize the fate of cancer cell therapy grafts post-transfer. He has authored more than 100 scholarly publications in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, and biomedicine and is an inventor on 12 patents.

Ulrich Floegel is a professor for experimental cardiovascular imaging at the Department of Molecular Cardiology, Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf, Germany. His research focuses on the interplay of function, energetics, metabolism, and inflammation as well as their role in the development of cardiovascular disease using innovative multinuclear MRI/MRS techniques, particularly 19F tracers. His efforts have established a broad molecular imaging platform that can track inflammatory and thrombotic processes with high specificity in parallel to metabolic and energetic alterations together with in-depth tissue microstructure characterizations.