Abstract:

Deuterium (²H) magnetic resonance imaging is an emerging molecular metabolic imaging method that can visualize the metabolic pathway in vivo, and therefore has great potential in clinical applications such as cancer detection. In this work, we aimed to compare the metabolic characteristics of three different deuterium-labeled glucose, namely [6,6’-²H₂]-glucose, [2,3,4,6,6’-²H₅]-glucose, and [1,2,3,4,5,6,6’-²H₇]-glucose through glioma cell experiment. The rat glioma C6 cells were incubated with three deuterium-labeled glucose, and cell media samples were collected at different time points, and underwent magnetic resonance deuterium spectroscopy to obtain the glucose consumption and the production of downstream metabolites, such as water and lactate, at each time point. The results showed that all three kinds of deuterium-labeled glucose probes were able to demonstrate the characteristic of tumor metabolism, and there was no significant difference in the consumption rate of the three kinds of deuterium-labeled glucose probes, and the production of the deuterium-labeled water and deuterium-labeled lactate were consistent with the theoretical estimation. Therefore, this paper concludes that the cost-effective deuterium-labeled glucose probe [2,3,4,6,6’-²H₅]-glucose has great clinical translational values.

Key words: deuterium magnetic resonance imaging, deuterated glucose, glioma cells, ²H NMR