2019-20 Innovation Fund Awards

This £14,000 award is to develop safer and more detailed lung scans for patients with lung disease including cystic fibrosis, bronchiectasis and lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM).

 Cystic fibrosis affects more than 10,000 people in the UK and bronchiectasis affects around 200,000 people, leading to chronic, recurrent chest infections which can require intense treatment. LAM is a rare lung disease that mainly affects women, but currently there are few available treatments.

New therapies for the conditions are leading to increasingly personalised treatment, which in turn needs more precise monitoring. Currently CT scans give very detailed information about the lungs, but their repeated use is limited due to radiation exposure. MRI scans are radiation-free but usually give less information.

The Innovation Award will pay for developing a new type of lung MRI scan with extremely short echo times, which should produce images comparable to a CT scan, working at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre. The technique will then be used to acquire data for analysis from a wider study of patients.

As part of this project the BRC’s principal investigators, Dr Jonathan Brooke, Dr Shahideh Safavi and Dr Michael Barlow will also be working with Professor Jason Woods' Lung MRI research group at the Cincinnati Pulmonary Imaging Centre.