CROs Forge Imaging Partnership to Meet Biopharma Industry Need
The molecular imaging center - which is expected to open in Q2 of 2014 in Mattawan, Michigan - will provide drug developers with the first commercially available facility “that produces the radionuclide using a cyclotron, conducts the imaging, and analyses and quantitates the results using proprietary image analysis software,” Joan Manners, MBA, MPI’s senior director of global marketing, told us.
Many of the imaging solutions at the new center, including nonhuman primate PET and CT imaging capabilities, will be available in July 2013. Biopharma companies and some smaller companies working in therapeutic areas such as cancer, CNS, inflammation and infectious disease “will most certainly use these solutions,” Manners said.
Marc Berridge, PhD, president of 3D Imaging, told Outsourcing-Pharma.com that each of the partners offers its own beneficial piece to the alliance, which will result in a product that no other CRO can offer.
“MPI is the world leader in toxicology studies and animal models including imaging capability…3D Imaging provides people who are capable of designing and producing radiotracers in a manner acceptable to FDA [and]… for imaging in MPI's animal models and cameras, [while] InviCRO has a team of scientists with the ability to perform world-class analysis of the resulting images to provide useful data, acceptable to FDA,” Dr. Berridge said.
Jack Hoppin, PhD, co-founder and managing partner of inviCRO, added, “No other commercial facility in the world can offer translational molecular imaging capabilities from mice to nonhuman primates, and Carbon-11 to Zirconium-89, under one roof.”
Elaborating on his company’s work with 3D Imaging’s custom tracer technology, Dr. Berridge said it can “label drug molecules” to allow for “detailed regional biodistribution and kinetics to be measured accurately for a completepharmacokineticpicture of the drug.” The tracers also measure regional pharmacodynamics to “ask questions that relate to whether a drug hits the biochemical target or has a desired, or undesired, biochemical, physiological, or metabolic effect.”
