A small, simple, affordable, table top scanner to detect cellular changes in fat percentage in bone marrow as an early indicator of treatment efficacy.

Accessible, Affordable, Sensitive, Noninvasive, at the Doctor’s clinic

UNMET NEED
Bone marrow adiposity in postmenopausal women increases with osteoporosis There is a negative association between bone marrow fat and the rate of bone formation or BMD.
Typically, hormonal changes associated with the postmenopausal phase trigger the pathways that alter the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells into adipocytes, disrupting the equilibrium between adipocyte and osteoblast differentiation This process starts long before BMD changes are obvious Conventional MRI and NMR were proven to detect osteoporosis based on bone marrow fat measurements Different relaxivity patterns of the NMR signals were observed for postmenopausal women, relative to healthy controls indicating higher fat percentage and correlating with low BMD.
But conventional MRI is too expensive and cannot be used as a point of care method.
For now, there is no easy method to monitor early changes in BMD (bone mineral density) to assess treatment efficacy in osteoporotic patients, as existing tools are not sensitive enough).
OUR SOLUTION
Experiments performed in Tel Aviv University demonstrated that changes occurring in the bone marrow that are related to the onset of osteoporosis and to its treatment, can be detected by the use of a mobile stray field NMR We propose to build a dedicated mobile stray field NMR device based on a permanent magnet to measure relaxivity patterns The methods and algorithms that were developed in Tel Aviv University neglect the need of heavy magnets and gradients modules, and may results in a simple scanner that can be affordable for small clinics (Fig 1).
STATUS
The team is led by Prof I. Binderman and Prof. U. Nevo from TAU (bone metabolism and NMR, respectively), Dr. Y Schiffenbauer (clinical trials and product design).
Clinical trials were performed in collaboration with the Sourasky medical center in Tel Aviv.