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Understanding the complexity of the lungs: insights from our MAGNIFY Strategic Research Centre

Feature - 23/10/2025

Last month, our Senior Impact Adviser, Belinda, joined an in-person progress meeting in Sheffield, for researchers working within a Strategic Research Centre collaboration co-funded by the Trust and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in the United States. The aim of the research programme is to investigate whether a new type of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) could be used to track changes in lung health over time.

Monitoring the lung health of everyone with CF is important, both to track health over time and to test the effectiveness of new medicines in clinical trials. Current monitoring methods such as FEV1 may miss more subtle changes in lung health, particularly for those who are on modulator medicines.

Led by Prof Jim Wild and Dr Laurie Smith at the University of Sheffield, scientists in our MAGNIFY SRC are exploring how new types of lung MRI scans might be used in CF research and for CF care in the future. Within this research programme, they are refining everything from the best way to run the scans to how to support CF teams and people with CF to understand the data they are producing.

Here are my six takeaways from the SRC visit:

Understanding lung function and structure

The scientists and doctors involved in this research are using a technique called Xenon-MRI to understand how the lungs of people with CF are working, as well as to provide information about the structure of the lungs. Xenon-MRI is not used routinely to measure lung function in people with CF at the moment.

Scans are being run on people with full lungs (holding their breath after a big breath in), with nearly empty lungs (holding their breath after a big breath out) and as people breathe normally for a few minutes while lying in the scanner. As we breath in and out, our lungs move and function in different ways. All these different types of scans help doctors understand what’s happening in the lungs in people with CF.

Scan results from different hospitals

One of the aims of the study is to work out how to compare the MRI results collected from different hospitals. The MRI scanners used might be made by different companies and may have different power settings (different strength magnets). MRI stands for Magnetic Resonance Imaging – in physics terms, they use magnetic fields and radio waves to create images of the lungs. This means working out what scanner settings and programmes need to be changed.

Studying changes in CF lung function over time

Researchers within the SRC are using Xenon-MRI to find out more about CF, as well as developing the technology. They are currently running a series of studies to understand in more detail how the lungs of people with CF change over time. This includes studies investigating lung function in people who don’t have access to modulators, as well as those that do. These studies will provide important information for improving lung health for people with CF in the future.

Predicting where medicines end up in the lungs

How air moves around the lungs of people with CF is likely to be affected by inflammation or blockages, where some areas of the lungs receive more air than others. Knowing more about air movement in the lungs is important for clinical trials of inhaled medicines. For example, CF genetic therapies that have the potential to benefit everyone with CF. But it is difficult to measure!

Manchester-based researchers are developing computational simulations to predict air movement in the lungs of people with CF. Once they have the equations worked out, they can test them using information about the lungs gathered from running the Xenon-MRI scans.

Support to understand the results of MRI scans

An important part of the SRC is ensuring that everyone understands the role lung MRI scans could have for CF research and care. To do this, one programme within the SRC is developing a ‘toolkit’ of information for CF teams and the CF community that they support. The toolkit is being co-developed with the CF community.

Lots of expertise is needed!

One of the most striking things was the range of skills and expertise of everybody sitting around the table. This ranged from those with physics and engineering knowledge to install and programme the MRI machines, to physiologists who are working with people with CF to perform the scans and analyse the data, to CF adult physicians to understand what the MRI results were telling them about the lung health of their patients.

Find out more about the MAGNIFY-SRC