Three Things to Know About the Revamped Gordon Center for Medical Imaging

Earlier this year, the Gordon Center for Medical Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital relaunched under the leadership of Matthias Nahrendorf, PhD, an established Mass General researcher whose work focuses on the role of immunity in cardiovascular health and disease.

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In a recent conversation, Dr. Nahrendorf outlined the new research emphasis in the Gordon Center and described its new, "extremely collaborative" mission. Here are three key takeaways from the conversation, each followed by elaboration from Dr. Nahrendorf.

1. Research in the Gordon Center will concentrate on inflammation and, importantly, the many disease areas that involve inflammation.

Future work in the Gordon Center will focus on inflammation and imaging targets related to inflammation. We are specifically looking at targets expressed on immune cells that fuel inflammation, but the idea is to go after these targets in a fashion that will allow us to apply any tools we develop in a variety of disease settings.

Because our cells of interest in the immune system permeate different disease entities, we expect to see quite a bit of synergy in our work. Say we develop an imaging agent that targets a cell active in neuroinflammation. That same cell may also be a bad actor in cardiovascular disease or cancer so that we can apply the agent in those areas. That's the type of synergy we hope to harness.

The beauty of an inflammation-themed research center is that inflammation has a hand in pretty much any pathology you can think of.

2. The primary aim of research in the Center will be developing an application of imaging agents that target inflammation.

There will be continuity with respect to the modalities the center has worked with in the past. For instance, optical imaging and PET imaging are important modalities that we plan to use in the future. The difference is that we will focus on target discovery and building agents, validating these agents, and pursuing first-in-human studies.

It will be a fairly ambitious pipeline of work, but I believe the infrastructure within Mass General Brigham Imaging can support it. The department is one of the world's leading imaging forces; it really has been a powerhouse of research over the past decades. So much work has gone into establishing an imaging infrastructure, and much of this infrastructure can now also be harnessed for the mission of the Gordon Center.

3. The Center will continue to take advantage of the world-class imaging infrastructure at Mass General Brigham, while building expertise in biology that will benefit research across the Department

Our mission is fundamentally a very collaborative one. My plan is to entice other players in the field to collaborate as we continue to develop expertise in biology. Traditionally, radiology hasn't been quite as strong in biology. We see this as an opportunity: one in which we will build expertise and use it to catalyze agent development.

Important collaborators at Mass General will include Umar Mahmood, MD, PhD, director of the Center for Precision Imaging, and the team at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. We also hope to work across the enterprise. We already work closely with Brigham and Women's researchers including Peter Libby, MD, a prominent scientist working in inflammation, and Marcelo Fernando DiCarli, MD, chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging in the Department of Radiology.

Anyone interested in discussing a possible collaboration with the Gordon Center should feel free to reach out to me.

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