News from Biotrofix
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE BETWEEN RESEARCH FIRMS WILL COMBINE EXPERTISE IN CNS AND VASCULAR DISEASE MODELS WITH TRANSLATIONAL, MULTI-MODAL IMAGING
Biotrofix and Ekam Imaging announce a nonclinical CRO partnership, which will provide capabilities unique in the field of neuroscience
February, 2011 - Boston, MA — Aiming to minimize risk from preclinical development, Biotrofix and Ekam Imaging announced this month they have entered into a partnering agreement together to provide synergistic capabilities to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. The goal of the partnership is to deliver high-quality, accurate and translatable data that greatly assists their sponsors by allowing them to make faster and better-informed decisions.
“Our clients and the industry demand services that help them in their efforts toward advancing novel therapies by providing actionable information that’s more translatable than what standard, small animal pharmacology can generate,” commented Dr. Seth Finkelstein, CEO of Biotrofix. “We believe the addition of Ekam’s unique imaging capabilities will provide incremental data of great value to our clients, supplying imaging endpoints identical to those captured in clinical trials.”
Biotrofix works with animals with neurological and vascular diseases by performing physiological and behavioral tests, and any direct change that occurs in brain function as a consequence of these diseases —which requires sophisticated imaging— needs to be done separately. The result of this new alliance with Ekam Imaging eliminates this limitation. After preparing the test subjects and doing all behavioral tests on them, Biotrofix then provides them to Ekam, where all the imaging takes place, thereby delivering a one-stop shop for this critical information.
“Animal behavior —the traditional means of evaluating CNS drug efficacy— does not translate to the human condition reliably, costing the drug industry an enormous amount of time and money when, in clinical trials, it is discovered that the drug doesn’t work,” said Mark Nedelman, M.S., M.B.A, president of Ekam. “The need to perform imaging under anesthesia has produced a significant gap in providing more translatable data when studying diseases affecting the CNS. The testing we will now be able to perform in partnership with Biotrofix examines the patterns of brain activity and the affects of treatment and/or disease on integrated neural circuits in awake animals thus generating data analogous to clinical trials.”
“Pharmaceutical and biotech companies will definitely benefit from our partnership,” concluded Dr. Seth Finkelstein. “All they will now need is to bring us their requests and we’ll provide them with integrated solutions.”
About Biotrofix
Waltham-based Biotrofix is a preclinical CRO with efficacy and animal behavior assessment expertise across multiple CNS and vascular disease models. Founded in 2004 and lead by Seth P. Finklestein, M.D., former Associate Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts General Hospital and former Director of the NIH-funded CNS Growth Factor Research Laboratory at MGH, Biotrofix has provided and continues to provide high-quality pharmacology studies serving some of the world's largest pharmaceutical & biotechnology companies.
About Ekam Imaging
Ekam Imaging, Inc. is a preclinical CRO specializing in imaging studies on awake animals providing a unique approach to evaluating the circuitry that underlies the behavioral and/or therapeutic effects of a drug. In collaboration with the Center for Translational Neuroimaging (CTNI) at Northeastern University in Boston under the direction of Professor Craig Ferris, Ph.D., a pioneer in awake animal imaging, Ekam removes a major limitation of current preclinical imaging—especially relating to the brain— that animals must be anesthetized.
For more information, press only:
Nicole Green (Biotrofix; www.biotrofix.com)
(781) 314-9300, Nicole.green@biotrofix.com
Mark Nedelman (Ekam; www.ekamimaging.com)
(617) 281-5499, mark.nedelman@ekamimaging.com
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