LINKÖPING, Sweden, April 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, AMRA Medical announced an expansion of its dataset, resulting from a collaboration with Pfizer Inc. and UK Biobank, from 10,000 to 25,000 UK Biobank participants – another step toward their shared goal of analyzing the body composition of 100,000 individuals. These data could aid scientific and clinical researchers in further investigations within a wide range of complex diseases, as well as overall metabolic health.

In 2020, AMRA renewed its partnership with Pfizer to assemble 100,000 composition profiles – making it, when completed, potentially the world's largest detailed study of its kind. The partnership underscores AMRA's and Pfizer's commitment to advancing science to improve the lives of patients affected by diseases rooted in metabolic dysregulation.

This expansion involved generating extensive data using AMRA's rapid and highly standardized imaging protocol for body composition profiling, providing norms for several metabolic conditions – such as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), obesity, and diabetes – that can potentially serve as a reference in future clinical trials and clinical practice. Additionally, the high-quality imaging outputs, linked with the existing extensive genetic and phenotypic data from UK Biobank – including disease status, outcome data, and biomarker data ­– will enable new discoveries and insights.

AMRA researchers also collected and validated new measurements for liver fat values and muscle fat infiltration in separate thigh muscle volumes, segmented into the left, right, anterior, and posterior regions, compared to previous measurements that included only the average muscle fat infiltration. These new measurements enable more detailed investigations in metabolic research and around muscle-related disease.

"This is potentially the largest imaging dataset with liver proton density fat fraction associated with detailed characteristics and genetics of the participants, offering the potential to improve scientific and clinical understanding of several increasingly prevalent complex metabolic diseases. We hope this expansive, high-quality dataset will help identify and validate new therapeutic targets that can advance life-changing drugs," said Jennifer Linge, Lead Scientist for Precision Medicine at AMRA Medical.

"We are thrilled by the continued expansion of this critical dataset, which we hope will provide further insight into the factors driving the metabolic diseases that impact millions of patients around the world," added Morris Birnbaum, MD, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer for the Internal Medicine Research Unit at Pfizer. "This work with AMRA and UK Biobank continues to exemplify the role that strong collaborations play in advancing scientific understanding."

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