Pfizer and AMRA announce body composition measurement study

Pfizer is partnering with the Swedish medical health technology firm Advanced MR Analytics (AMRA) on a new study into body composition measurement and analysis.

This international collaboration will investigate the relationship between fat and muscle distribution in the body and metabolic health, including risk factors for conditions such as obesity and diabetes.

It will assess fat and muscle measurements from magnetic resonance images in up to 7,000 subjects who are currently part of the UK Biobank registry. It will expand the current understanding of the relationship between body composition and risk for obesity-related diseases, as well as a broader understanding of conditions linked to body composition.

The research will utilise AMRA's body composition technology, the AMRA Profiler Research tool, which translates MRI scans into fat and muscle measurements via a cloud-based service.

Dr Morris Birnbaum, senior vice-president and chief scientific officer for cardiovascular and metabolic disease research at Pfizer, said: "We hope that AMRA's technology can help us in developing new drugs to treat diseases associated with lipid overload, such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, diabetic heart disease and insulin resistance syndromes."

This comes after the firm announced the completion of its acquisition of Hospira earlier this month, a move that will considerably expand its capabilities of injectable drugs, infusion technologies and biosimilars.