Eli Lilly and Company Joins SNM's Clinical Trials Network

SNM announced that biopharmaceutical company, Eli Lilly and Company, has joined SNM’s Clinical Trials Network-making it the third major company to formally support this initiative to facilitate the development of promising therapeutic medicines.

"We are very pleased to welcome Lilly to SNM’s Clinical Trials Network," said Peter S. Conti, M.D., professor of radiology, clinical pharmacy and biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and co-chair of the network. "Through their support, this initiative will continue to make strides toward delivering critical therapies to patients more quickly, safely and cost-effectively."

In October 2008, SNM announced the creation of the SNM Clinical Trials Network. The network is a collaborative effort designed to address the widely recognized need for validated imaging biomarkers to be used in streamlining the development and registration of investigational therapeutics. The network will apply for and hold investigational new drug (IND) applications that will be available to cross-reference in multicenter clinical trials of investigational therapeutics that require INDs for imaging agents to assess response to treatment or to stratify patients for enrollment in clinical trials.

Since launching in late 2008, more than 200 imaging sites and manufacturers in the United States, Europe and Asia have enrolled in the network. The network is currently qualifying sites and plans to roll out the first clinical trial in 2010. The network will improve standardization across multiple imaging sites within a single trial. Through strict adherence to common and appropriate protocols, the network will facilitate more consistent imaging data within multicenter trials-ultimately leading to personalized diagnostics and therapies for patients.

"Discovering and developing innovative therapies for many of the world's unmet medical needs is at the core of our mission," said Johannes Tauscher, M.D., a medical fellow and head of the translational imaging group at Eli Lilly. "Eli Lilly seeks to improve patient outcomes by accelerating our therapeutic pipeline by using molecular imaging. We look forward to partnering with SNM’s Clinical Trials Network on this initiative."

SNM is an international scientific and medical organization dedicated to raising public awareness about molecular imaging and how it can help provide patients with the best health care possible. The Clinical Trials Network brings together pharmaceutical developers, the imaging community, biomarker manufacturers and regulatory agencies to work toward a common goal of streamlining drug discovery and integrating imaging biomarkers into multicenter clinical trials. The Clinical Trials Network was formed based on a common and ongoing community need for improved performance and availability of imaging biomarkers. The use of imaging in clinical trials can help pharmaceutical developers determine earlier in the development process whether a new product is clinically promising or whether it is working as intended for a patient.