BG Medicine provides information on its latest news and research developments.
This trend article is an immediate alert from NewsRx to identify the most recent news developments at BG Medicine.
Report 1: BG Medicine, Inc., and Applied Biosystems Group (ABI), an Applera Corp. business, announced that the companies have entered into a collaboration agreement in which they will work together to enhance biomarker discovery and development.
Under the terms of the agreement, BG Medicine will integrate life science technology from Applied Biosystems into its proteomic and metabolomic systems pharmacology workflows and begin to explore applications for Applied Biosystems' genomic tools. The technology will be employed in several strategic initiatives and proprietary programs at BG Medicine over the next 2 years. As part of this collaboration, Applied Biosystems is expected to be able to evaluate how its technology fits into emerging high-throughput platforms and how it supports the evolving requirements of customers in this field.
Molecular medicine combines medical studies with biochemistry. It involves the study of proteins, metabolites and gene expression to better understand the effects of diseases and the potential effectiveness of new treatments. The use of biomarkers offers knowledge about the presence of disease and the role of the biological indicators to improve drug development, early detection of disease, treatment selection and early detection of treatment response.
"With the rapid emergence of molecular medicine and biomarker-guided drug development initiatives, there is an explosive demand for biomarker discovery and validation research as well as the platforms that will deliver these biomarkers to the market," said Pieter Muntendam, MD, president and CEO of BG Medicine. "This broad collaboration with Applied Biosystems should allow us to jointly make important contributions to this new medical and drug development research."
Report 2: The Global Alliance for TB Drug Development (TB Alliance) and BG Medicine Inc. announced a collaboration to identify biomarkers for drug efficacy in the treatment of tuberculosis (TB).
Today, clinical trials for TB drugs are based on standard treatment regimens requiring 6-9 months of therapy, with efficacy evaluation taking another 1-2 years to measure relapse rates in those patients who have not been successfully cured. In total, clinical trials required to register a TB drug can take a minimum of 6 years, much longer than trials for other infectious diseases. The result is high drug development costs and long delays in introducing new medicines. The identification of biomarkers could streamline and accelerate the process.
A biomarker is a quantifiable biochemical characteristic, such as a metabolite, hormone or enzyme, that is measured and evaluated as a pharmacologic response to therapy. Biomarkers can be particularly useful in clinical trials to predict a person's response to a compound and in some cases serve as the basis of a surrogate endpoint. Having such markers facilitates decision-making in the drug development process, enabling earlier decisions, for example, as to whether to terminate a compound's development or advance it into late stage clinical trials.
Report 3: BG Medicine, Inc., announced a collaborative preclinical research study into the biochemical origins of muscle toxicity and associated biomarkers with Mitsubishi Pharma Corp., of Osaka, Japan.
BG Medicine (BGM) will apply their proprietary, integrated systems approach based on proteomics, metabolomics and computational analyses to describe the molecular effects of selected lipid lowering agents on skeletal muscle and to identify specific plasma biomarkers of these effects. Mitsubishi Pharma Corp. will contribute transcript, clinical chemistry and histopathology data to the effort.
Muscle toxicity in lipid-lowering agents, a common adverse effect of these agents, covers a broad spectrum from mild and transient muscle pain to the extremely rare but serious acute muscle destruction.
"This exciting project uses BG Medicine's commercial systems toxicology platform to characterize and compare the molecular effects of two lipid lowering compounds at the dosages in which histopathological changes in muscle were observed in some animals," said Pieter Muntendam, MD, president and CEO of BG Medicine. "In this context it is a great example of how systems toxicology and pharmacology provide early insightful biology for pertinent drug development decisions."
Under this agreement BG Medicine and Mitsubishi Pharma Corp. will jointly own certain rights to the project data and biomarkers.
Several U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies are utilizing BG Medicine's platform to correlate various disease effects with new classes of drugs. Recently the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development selected BG Medicine to identify biomarkers for new drugs in the treatment of tuberculosis.