Dr. Michael McMahon Visited and Gave a seminar to WIPM

    With the invitation of Professor Xin Zhou, Dr. Michael McMahon, who is from Johns Hopkins University, paid an academic visit to WIPM of CAS on November 6th. He presented his research report entitled "Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer MRI Contrast Agent for Monitoring Therapy".

    In his report, Dr. McMahon first introduced the theory signal enhancement of Chemical Exchange Saturation Transfer (CEST) MRI. With the chemical exchange between exchangeable protons on amino or hydroxyl and bulk water, the weak signal of exchangeable protons is enhanced indirectly through water signal when saturation pulses are put on the exchangeable sites. On the basis of this, Dr. McMahon developed a series CEST contrast agents that applied in vivo imaging. Due to the high pH sensitivity of the exchange rate between -NH on L-arginine and water, Dr. McMahon developed a CEST nano probe that was able to detect the survival ratio of transplanted cells. In addition, Dr. McMahon developed a series of derivates of Salicylic Acid, which had relative large chemical shift of the exchangeable protons, thus the drawbacks of the narrow chemical shift difference between exchange sites and water of current CEST agents were conquered.

    Apart from the research report, Dr. McMahon visited the laboratory and had a warm and deep discussion focused on the designing and potential of CEST contrast agents with the staff and students. Dr. Michael McMahon received his PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on 1999 and the conducted post-doc research in MIT. Dr. McMahon is an associate professor in the School of Medicine in Johns Hopkins University now, doing research on the field of MRI, with several articles published on Nature Materials, JACS, Angew. Chem, etc.