Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths in the United States. The absence of early symptoms and lack of reliable screening tests have created a critical need for identifying and developing new strategies for the early detection of pancreatic cancer. Unlike other cancers, such as breast or prostate cancer that has over 90% five-year survival, pancreatic cancer relatively has a least five-year survival (~10%). Therefore, there is an unmet need for screening technologies that can identify high risk-premalignant lesions or early-stage pancreatic cancer. It has been estimated that there is a window of opportunity of ~10 years from the moment in which a pancreatic epithelial cell undergoes an oncogenic hit and the time of PDAC diagnosis. Since pancreatic premalignant lesions such as pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanINs) preceding cancer development cannot be detected by conventional methods (MRI, CT), PDAC preventive strategies cannot be deployed in a timely fashion and therefore efficacy cannot be effectively assessed in vivo. Hyperpolarized MRI (HP MRI) has become a major new non-invasive imaging modality that provides valuable information on previously inaccessible aspects of biological processes by detecting endogenous, non-toxic 13C-labeled probes that can monitor enzymatic conversions through key biochemical pathways. Several clinical trials with this modality are ongoing for variety of cancers (https://clinicaltrials.gov/). The HP 13C pyruvate-based metabolic MRI has proven highly sensitive for detecting pancreatic premalignant lesions in PDAC animal models. Hyperpolarization allows for >10,000-fold sensitivity enhancement relative to conventional magnetic resonance and is a non-radioactive imaging method. The Warburg effect is a hallmark metabolic feature of cancers, including PDAC, that causes them to preferentially metabolize pyruvate to lactate via the glycolytic pathway. Hence, metabolism-based dynamic HP 13C MRI represents a novel strategy to identify and understand early metabolic aberrations, and to enable the detection of advanced pancreatic preneoplastic lesions, as well as pancreatic cancer, for which no approved methods of detection currently exist. The overarching goal of this task order is to rigorously test the capability of real-time metabolic imaging biomarkers for the early detection of pancreatic cancer and establish the sensitivity and specificity of hyperpolarized 13C MRI modality to better understand timing, specific biomarkers and precise threshold of detection of premalignancy in different genetically engineered mouse models of PDAC.