LINKÖPING, Sweden, April 30, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- AMRA
Medical announced they have expanded their collaboration with
Pfizer Inc. (NYSE: PFE) to further investigate body fat
distribution and muscle composition within a wide range of
diseases, as well as overall metabolic health.
In 2015, AMRA and Pfizer launched a pilot collaboration to
perform body composition profiling from magnetic resonance images
(MRI) in individuals who were part of the UK Biobank registry to
better understand the relationship between body composition and
risk for obesity-related diseases. AMRA has since analyzed over
10,000 datasets for body composition, resulting in 7 peer-reviewed
journal articles and 24 peer-reviewed conference abstracts. The
data from this research is now publicly available through the UK
Biobank resource.
The renewed partnership involves body composition analysis of
100,000 individuals who were part of the UK Biobank – making it,
when completed, potentially the largest detailed study of its kind
in the world. The extensive dataset will include highly
standardized imaging biomarkers to establish individualized norms
for certain metabolic conditions – such as NAFLD/NASH, obesity, and
diabetes – that can serve as a reference in future clinical trials
and clinical practice. Further, the project will provide a
unique resource linking the high-quality imaging outputs with
genetic and phenotypic data from the UK Biobank – including disease
status, outcome data, and biomarker data – to enable new
discoveries and insights.
"With the addition of the imaging data to the already
phenotypically and genotypically rich UK Biobank dataset, we
believe there is potential to advance scientific and clinical
understanding of a number of highly complex diseases related to
metabolic dysregulation, the prevalence of which is increasing
around the world," said Morris
Birnbaum, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer
for the Internal Medicine Research Unit at Pfizer. "We hope the
findings from this collaboration will help identify and validate
new therapeutic targets that can advance breakthroughs that change
patients' lives."
Sir Rory Collins, UK Biobank
Principal Investigator and BHF Professor of Medicine and
Epidemiology at Oxford University,
said: "UK Biobank's goal is to provide a resource to support
imaginative health research around the world. It is fantastic that
the resource is sparking new and successful partnerships like this
one that are driving research forward in ways that could not have
been imagined when UK Biobank was started. We look forward to
seeing how these data contribute to the welfare of patients in the
years to come."
AMRA is continuously working towards developing new biomarkers
and continues to strive towards building a real-world database
representative of the global population. The collaboration with
Pfizer supports this endeavor and will potentially enable the
development of high-utility imaging biomarkers and/or the
identification of disease phenotypes.
About AMRA Medical:
AMRA is an informatics company
focused on next generation phenotyping and is at the forefront of
combining AI and real-world data for precision medicine. The
company has developed a new global standard in body composition
assessment, the ability to automatically produce multiple fat and
muscle biomarkers with unrivaled precision and accuracy, as well as
contextual disease insights – all from a single, rapid, whole-body
MRI. AMRA was founded in 2010 as a spin-off of Linköping
University, Sweden, with the aim
to support transformative care and vital decision making from
clinical research to health and wellness.
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SOURCE AMRA Medical