NMR relaxometry for biomedicine and advanced materials

Field-cycling relaxometry experienced a tremendous boost during the last decade. It represents an ease and versatile tool to monitor structure and dynamics in a wide range of time scales, from picoseconds to milliseconds, providing information of great importance for understanding the properties of biological systems and improving materials and drugs. Despite the numerous, emerging possibilities of applications, theoretical approaches for the analysis of the relaxometry data are often controversial and, for some systems, accurate models have not been identified. The FC-RELAX project aims at developing the theoretical knowledge of the field dependent relaxation processes taking advantage of the joint effort of some of the main European actors in the field, and at exploiting all potentialities of field-cycling relaxometry for different biomedical applications and for the characterization of advanced materials. The objectives are the improvement of efficacy and safety of MRI contrast agents and paramagnetic nanosystems for theranostics, the exploitation of relaxometry for cancer diagnosis and for the development of partially crystalline materials, and of ionic liquids for their use as electrolytes in energy storage devices. The program is based on high-level multidisciplinary and multisectoral training, and on a consortium of tight and complementary experimental scientists and theoreticians. FC-RELAX comprises 10 academic partners and 3 companies from 8 European countries, and will train 10 researchers who will benefit by extensive interactions between academic and industrial partners, endowed with state-of-the art scientific and technical expertise and infrastructures. The industrial partners include the only company in the world producing field-cycling relaxometers, a European company leader in the research and production of MRI contrast agents, and a scientific oriented technology company on the world market of magnetic resonance instrumentation.