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 We believe
that the 21st century is all about diagnosis. Our three key patented
medical diagnostic products are growing by 20 per cent, and changes
in the healthcare landscape - in particular, the ageing of the population
and the pressure to improve patient accessibility to healthcare
as well as to reduce costs - will continue to drive the growth of
medical diagnostics. More and more, patients and physicians will
look to diagnosis both to accurately identify disease and to monitor
that their treatment is working.
In ten years, 20 per cent of the population of Western Europe,
the United States and Japan will be over the age of 65. These increased
numbers of older citizens are poised to overwhelm current healthcare
systems, with more people needing and demanding care and fewer people
paying for it. Improved diagnostic testing is one of the solutions,
allowing physicians to intervene in illnesses earlier, keeping patients
healthier longer, reducing hospitalisations and avoiding costly
chronic nursing care.
Looking further ahead, diagnostic products will illuminate the
functional biology of genomics
in the way they have illuminated the functional pathology of anatomy
- by making genes, which once were invisible, visible. In talking
to our colleagues in Amersham Biosciences, we are well aware of
the possibilities technology offers and the changes in medical diagnostic
tests that might come through. Therefore, we make sure that our
work complements advances in technology. Our mission is to reshape
the traditional healthcare model - moving from diagnosis and treatment
of symptoms, to the prediction and prevention of disease. Diagnostics
will play a key role in this development.
Imanet™
is a developing network of imaging research centres. It is built
around two world-leading centres in the UK and Sweden utilising
positron emission tomography (PET),
the most advanced molecular imaging technique available, and Spin
Signal™, a revolutionary form of magnetic resonance. Both of
these technologies will greatly improve the molecular understanding
of disease.
Through Imanet, Amersham Health will work with pharmaceutical companies
in pursuit of a common goal: to create complementary diagnostic
and therapeutic drugs that will enable the physician to prescribe
the right drug, for the right person, at the right time, with the
right outcome.
Technological advances have created a plethora of potential new
drug targets for pharmaceutical companies to exploit. We can use
Imanet's worldclass resources to help pharmaceutical companies screen
molecules early in the development cycle and show how they work
through in
vivo images of the disease mechanisms in the targeted cells
or tissues. Diagnostics and therapeutics can then be developed in
tandem - a molecular diagnostic to pinpoint the characteristics
of a specific disease, and a targeted therapeutic to treat the disease.
The collaboration with Pfizer is the first such agreement - we expect
others to follow.
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