LUXEMBOURG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL) S.A., a Luxembourg-based company, is pleased to announce the signing of 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.
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.
About LALREAN
LALREAN is a collaborative research,
educational, and awareness network developed among several Latin
American academic liver centers. It fosters expansion and quality of
patient care, medical education, awareness of liver diseases and
excellence in clinical and epidemiological research.
Latin America is a region with more than 500 million habitants with high prevalence of viral hepatitis (A, B, C, D and E), liver, and gallbladder and bile duct carcinomas. In the region, the impact of these diseases is probably higher than the estimated in central countries probably due to the presence of a different spectrum of risk factors, a different genetic predisposition, and more importantly lower diagnosis rates and a poor access to care.
About ABL
Advanced Biological Laboratories (ABL), S.A., is a
Medical Data Technology company founded in 2000 as a spin-off from
CRP-Santé Luxembourg. ABL took control of TherapyEdge, Inc. in 2004 and
in 2013 acquired the rights to all viral hepatitis B & C related assets
from EVIVAR MEDICAL, respectively. ABL has a comprehensive suite of
healthcare management tools, including TherapyEdge®, ViroScore®,
SeqHepB, DeepChek®, VisibleChek® and HepatiC™, which are used for data
and patient management, monitoring and personalized reporting
applications. In 2012, some of ABL's products received CE-marking for
IVD use. ABL's products offer infectious disease clinicians and virology
laboratories optimal and efficient IT solutions, for sequencing,
clinical genotyping, and drug resistance analysis, including powerful
fully integrated databases and analysis systems combining standard and
high-throughput Next Generation Sequencing data. More at www.ablsa.com.
All trademarks used or mentioned in this release are protected by law.
