Pfizer in metabolic disease push
pharmafile | September 11, 2015 | News story | Medical Communications, Research and Development | AMRA, Pfizer, UK Biobank, med tech, metabolic disease, obesity
Pfizer has signed a research collaboration with a global medical health technology company, to investigate risk factors for metabolic conditions.
The US pharma company has teamed up with Swedish med tech firm AMRA, to investigate the relationship between fat and muscle distribution in the body, and the risk factors for conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
The collaboration will assess fat and muscle measurements from MRI scans of up to 7,000 people who are currently part of the UK Biobank registry. This Government-backed medical research project is collecting and analysing health, medical, genetic, biochemical and imaging data from 500,000 people in the UK.
The companies say the objective of the collaboration is to “help provide a better understanding of the relationship between body composition and risk for obesity related diseases, as well as a broader understanding of conditions linked to body composition.”
Dr Morris Birnbaum, who is senior vice president and chief scientific officer for cardiovascular and metabolic disease research at Pfizer, says: “Obesity is often associated with the abnormal deposition of fat in tissues not designed for storage of lipids.
“Many current techniques to measure intracellular lipid can be cumbersome and expensive, which can limit their use in population studies and clinical trials. We hope that AMRA’s technology can help us in developing new drugs to treat diseases associated with lipid overload, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diabetic heart disease and insulin resistance syndromes.”
Tommy Johansson, chief executive at AMRA, says: “This collaboration has the potential to better understand the relationship between fat and muscle distribution and obesity related conditions. As more data becomes available via collaborations such as ours, the research and medical community, will be better equipped to make decisions on how to improve and personalise treatments for individuals with obesity related diseases.”
While UK Biobank chief executive Dr Tim Peakman says: “We are pleased to see the UK Biobank resource being used to help advance metabolic clinical understanding, hopefully prompting new and exciting areas of research. We are keen to take advantage of pioneering techniques that will allow us to get the best out of the data.”
AMRA technology is an advanced form of body composition analysis, the AMRATM Profiler Research, is a cloud-based, computer-aided body composition measurement program that can produce more accurate body composition measurements, such as muscle volumes and different type of fat compartments in the body, such as visceral and subcutaneous adipose tissue and thigh muscle volumes, based on a 10 minute MRI scan.
In Europe over 60% of adults are classified as being overweight or obese, and academics have called for more refined analyses of body composition than body mass index and as waist circumference, to better understand the risk factors that lead to obesity.
Professor Jimmy Bell from the University of Westminster, London, says these traditional measures only provide “very limited information on a person’s metabolic status or health risk”. He adds: “The potential impact of AMRA’s body composition measurement service and this collaboration is a much needed step forward in our understanding of many conditions that are increasing in the general population.”
Lilian Anekwe
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