The two most prestigious poster awards were bestowed on research teams from the radiology department of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, at the ISMRM-ESMRMB congress on Thursday. Another top prize went to a team from Stanford University in California.

 

Of the Johns Hopkins winners, a group led by Cong Li collected the top prize for an oncology poster of their work on multimodal image-guided enzyme/prodrug cancer therapy. Then Seth Aaron Smith's study on MRI of the cervical spinal cord at 3T was given first prize for a neurological poster.

Li and coauthors elaborated on continuing development of enzyme/prodrug therapy as a cancer treatment strategy. Administration of a tumor-targeted enzyme is followed by a nontoxic prodrug. Tumor-located enzyme then converts the prodrug to an anticancer drug, and normal tissues lacking the enzyme are spared toxic chemotherapy.

"Determining the optimal time window for prodrug injection is of utmost importance. Inaccurate timing will lead to either systemic toxicity or low therapeutic effect," the investigators said. "Noninvasive imaging of enzyme delivery would be ideal for optimizing the prodrug injection."

 

Smith and his colleagues have studied white-matter damage to the spinal cord and provided quantitative analysis of spinal cord tissue in controls and patients with adrenomyeloneuropathy, a noninflammatory dorsal column demyelination.