Q&A with Xiaoxiao Zhang and Xin Zhou

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In today’s interview, we discuss the latest paper by co-first author Xiaoxiao Zhang and last author Xin Zhou, from the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China. Their paper presents a newly discovered CEST contrast agent with a very high upfield shift, which may be applicable as a contrast agent for tumors.

For those who would like to get a quick overview of our discussion, below is an annotation of the interview. Clicking on the timestamp will take you to the exact video location where the topic is discussed.

00:38 Audioslides: Professor Xin Zhou provides a 5 minute overview of their paper, and how this discovery came about. Highly upfield shifted labile protons were measured in free-base porphyrins and chlorin, exceeding any other diamagnetic CEST (diaCEST) agents to date.

06:29 Xiaoxiao and Xin give us an overview of their backgrounds. Xiaoxiao is a PhD student at the Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics. Xin is a faculty member at that same institute, and also completed his PhD there. He did his post-doc at Harvard Medical School, and following that was a research fellow at UC Berkeley with Alexander Pines. The main research interests of his group are hyperpolarized xenon applications and contrast agent development.

09:41 Asked about limiting factors of their new contrast agent, the authors discuss some technical challenges they encountered and are still working on, such as how they need to resolve some dosage issues and how to lower the dosage to adapt it for human studies. Combining hyperpolarized xenon with the diaCEST agent may be one direction worth exploring to help resolve this dosing issue.

12:10 Xin expands on how this discovery came about. He discusses how important it is when discovering new small signals to compare it with existing results, and to consider possible new applications and ways of pushing them forward. During his time at Berkeley, Xin had the opportunity to discuss this with Erwin Hahn, who shared with him how he discovered the spin-echo, which also took some reflection to realize that this new signal he was measuring was useful and had broader applications.

14:32 Xiaoxiao emphasizes the importance of pH on diaCEST measurements.

15:52 Xin shares some interesting facts about their city (Wuhan), like how it is the city with the largest population of undergraduate and graduate students in the world. The city has a population of more than 10 million people, and more than 13% of that are university students. Wuhan also hosts the national center for magnetic resonance for China.

17:30 The authors shared some group and city photos, and shared a link to their research group’s website (www.zhougroup.org).