Clinical Trial Imaging – Innovation, Trends and Challenges
Contract Pharma – June 2009
Given the demand in drug development for both discovery and development biomarker capabilities, imaging has become an increasingly valuable tool. Pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical companies are progressively using imaging as an endpoint or surrogate endpoint, as part of their clinical trial designs. This plays into the goals of the FDA’s critical path initiative—using technology, imaging in particular, to enhance and expedite drug development efforts.
Although certain imaging methods can be expensive, using imaging technology can provide cost savings by reaching earlier go/no-go decisions, in addition to generating clear data of the drug’s efficacy. Growth in imaging services has been strong and technology continues to advance, helping to ease image quality issues, but standardization issues and timeliness of imaging analysis remain obstacles...Read the full article.