Non-Invasive Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Fibrosis

There is a major unmet medical need to noninvasively quantify fibrosis. Fibrosis quantification would enable early diagnosis of many chronic diseases and provide a means to monitor response to therapy, thus speeding evaluation of novel treatments. Noninvasive identification and staging of fibrosis would impact tens of millions of Americans with some form of chronic liver (e.g., hepatitis C), lung (e.g., idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis), or renal disease and hundreds of millions worldwide. In this proposal we will use a collagen-specific magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) probe to non-invasively quantify fibrosis in models of liver and lung fibrosis to assess disease progression and response to therapy. MRI studies will be correlated to a gold standard of histological markers of fibrosis.