Abstract

Towards NMR Biopsy

Alan Wong, Senior Scientist, CEA Saclay

HRMAS NMR spectroscopy of biopsies combined with statistical tools has now emerged as a powerful methodology for metabolomics NMR and has led to many important disease diagnosis, therapeutic target discovery and environmental assessment. However, due to the inherently poor sensitivity, NMR analysis often requires large tissue mass (5 to 20 mg). Such quantity could prevent from high-throughput screening of scarce tissues, and may hamper from the possibility of multi-clinical diagnostic analyses. Unfortunately, today there are NO means for NMR analysis of small quantity of tissue, or any soft-matters, where sample magic-angle spinning is essential for high quality data acquisition. For this reason, we have developed NMR-based analytical tools with good sensitivity, good reproducibility, and good metabolic spectral quality for tissue, and any other soft-matters, application. We developed a simple wireless micro NMR resonator (High-Resolution Magic-Angle Coil Spinning (MACS)), in which it can wirelessly coupled to a commercial HRMAS probe. Here, we present demonstrative studies using HRMACS 1H NMR spectroscopy for a complete metabolic profiling of rat brain biopsy, whole cells and small organisms. These works represent a significant leap towards the concept of needle NMR biopsy – a direct biopsy analysis in real-time clinical and surgical environments.