AMRA inks exclusive agreement with imaging CRO in Japan

19-Sep-2019 - Last updated on 19-Sep-2019 at 15:06 GMT

(Image: Getty/PhonlamaiPhoto)

The digital health company AMRA has entered into an exclusive agreement with the largest imaging CRO in Japan as part of its work to provide ‘critical informatics’ to the drug development industry.

Speaking to the agreement, Rosemary Shull, senior vice president of global business development and marketing at AMRA, said Micron is a “well-established and respected company that bridges the way into Japan for AMRA.”

Micron is an imaging contract research organization (CRO) based in Japan. Headquartered in Tokyo, the company also provides imaging-related technical and clinical trial support services.

Founded in 2010 as a spin-off of Linköping University in Sweden, AMRA has developed a body composition assessment capable of producing multiple fat and muscle biomarkers, in addition to contextual disease insights, from a whole-body MRI, according to the company.

AMRA received US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for the application – the AMRA Profiler – in December 2018.

“AMRA is keenly focused on providing critical informatics to the drug development and health care industries in order to better understand patients,” Shull said.

While AMRA is initially conducting clinical trials and academic research in Japan, Shull said the longer-term goal is “to be an integral part of what health and wellness providers offer.”

“The interest is driven by a desire for next-generation phenotyping; a far deeper look into an individual´s metabolic profile,” she added. “Understanding what's happening, quantitatively, reliably, and reproducibly inside your body, with a rapid MRI scan, means much more than other less robust measures of human health.”