Medical Products News

For pharmaceutical companies developing drugs for cancer, heart disease, osteoarthritis, or degenerative neurological diseases, it is crucial to know whether the disease is getting worse or is being contained by the drug being tested. Until recently, there have been few ways to quantitatively detect minute changes in these diseases and their reaction to new drugs.

VirtualScopics’ computer-assisted analysis techniques provide superior precision and reproducibility, enabling faster and more reliable detection of disease progression or therapeutic benefit, accelerating the clinical trial process, and providing a basis for future diagnostic applications. The company’s proprietary software algorithms can process hundreds of separate medical images taken during an imaging session into a single, anatomically accurate three-dimensional model, providing clinical researchers a previously unobtainable source of reproducible data, including the characterization of minute changes over time. This visionary biomedical firm evolved from research initially undertaken at the University of Rochester Medical Center and School of Engineering.

VirtualScopics has a large number of unique software products and processes that drastically improve drug development time. VirtualScopics utilizes its patented suite of image analysis algorithms to detect, measure and analyze specific biological structures from medical image data, such as that generated by computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US).

Now VirtualScopics has pioneered imageonomics, a new science that enables the precise measurement of small and subtle changes in structure and function over time. Imageonomics provides a total solution, from biomarker development to quantitative image analysis, to the world’s leading drug development companies, enabling them to make the go/no go decision on early stage compounds sooner and with greater confidence.

Headed by Stuart Shapiro, M.D. , who has had a successful career as both a businessman and as a physician, as well as a background in management and healthcare, VirtualScopics provides unparalleled depth of experience, technological capability and expertise in imaging for clinical trials. The company’s services support all aspects of imaging in clinical trials, from design to FDA submission.

“With the technology that we have been able to develop, we can produce a three-dimensional model that looks not only at the outside of the tumor, but also the inside, and we can track it over time, so that we can pick up what's happening to that tumor literally on a weekly basis and detect very, very sensitive and minimal changes. This capability gives the drug companies the opportunity to use fewer subjects in their trials and therefore allows the Pharmaceutical Companies to bring drugs through development much more quickly…,” said Dr. Shapiro.

For more information, see http://www.virtualscopics.com