Advertise With UsAdvertise on our extensive network of industry websites and newsletters.
Get the PBR newsletterSign up to our free email to get all the latest PBR
news.Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL), a Luxembourg-based company, has signed a licensing and collaboration agreement with LALREAN (Latin American Liver Research Awareness and Educational Network), a Latin American research network of excellence for study of liver diseases representing an active cohort of over 7,000 HCV infected-patients involving some 18 treatment centres in five countries.
Subscribe to our email newsletter
After a careful and prolonged pre start-up process, this highly qualified group of liver centers has already evolved into a formal alliance – LALREAN.
Although the Scientific Leaders who make up the network already provide a specialized opinion to national health care organizations on different aspects of liver diseases, an established and formal network will strengthen their impact on media and policy makers.
Furthermore, via LALREAN, locally produced scientific data will help to promote diagnosis, access to care and treatment and accelerate local regulatory approval timelines for new compounds.
LALREAN decided to start its formal activity in the region with a Hepatitis C Electronic Patient Management System: HepatiC is a collaborative, multi-sites and multi-users platform, coupled with a reporting system, VisibleChek. Both systems will help further understand disease epidemiology, patient baseline characteristics, burden of disease and treatment response rates.
ABL will support LALREAN to create and maintain this collaborative HCV database and provide access to the HepatiC product to physicians and laboratories participating in the LALREAN network.
"With the increasing complexity of HCV therapy, it is important to understand the implications of treatment failure on patient outcomes and use the current clinical experience to learn how to better treat patients in the future, especially with the introduction of new treatments. Only large scale collaborations can provide the power to build more accurate longitudinal tools needed to significantly improve patient care and tackle hepatitis", stated Dr Marcelo Silva, head of Hepatology and Liver Transplant Unit at Austral University Hospital in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and a LALREAN member.
"We will start with sites in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and Venezuela and in a second stage we plan to evolve into a stronger regional network expanding our activity to the following countries: Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay", stated Dr Silva.
"This collaboration is a great example of partnerships to add further diversity in our understanding, insights, and innovation in HCV care", said Dr Chalom Sayada, CEO of ABL; and he added, "we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues in Latin America and we are convinced this type of mixed expertise and teams will benefit HCV-infected patients".
The LALREAN network received an independent grant from global healthcare company MSD to support this collaborative initiative. MSD is a trade name of Merck & Co., Inc., with headquarters in Whitehouse Station, N.J., U.S.A.