GE Healthcare and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company announced an alliance to develop therapeutic drugs in the field of hepatic fibrosis to treat various liver diseases.
GE Healthcare announced on Nov. 11, 2014 an alliance agreement with Takeda Pharmaceutical to research and develop therapeutic drugs to target liver diseases. According to the alliance agreement, GE will provide Takeda with its diagnostic imaging technology to help develop diagnostic technologies and therapeutic drugs for liver diseases.
The collaboration will focus on hepatic fibrosis. The diagnosis of hepatic fibrosis is mostly conducted by a liver biopsy. With this partnership, however, Takeda will be able to use GE’s MR elastography, an MRI used to generate images depicting the elasticity of the body’s internal tissues based on pulses administered externally, to measure the relative stiffness of the liver tissue in a non-invasive manner.
