To tackle the human health challenges that face the world today, the FNIH develops collaborations with top experts from government, industry, academia and the not-for-profit sector and provides a neutral environment where we can work productively toward a common goal.
The Osteoarthritis Initiative was a public-private collaboration to improve the efficiency of drug development and clinical trials for the treatment of osteoarthritis, which affects more than 30 million adults in the United States.
Sarcopenia 2 seeks to establish evidence-based cut-points for muscle mass and strength and determine their predictive validity for clinically meaningful outcomes (such as mobility, fractures, hospitalization and death); evaluate relative strength as a discriminator for mobility limitation and incident disability; and explore the potential usefulness of sarcopenia as a clinical endpoint in randomized clinical trials.
The Sarcopenia 1 project launched in 2010 and aimed to establish the first evidence-based definition of sarcopenia (muscle weakness), which is still not recognized as a medical condition.
The Biomarkers Consortium - Osteoarthritis Biomarkers Project is a $3.4 million study aimed at determining which biomarkers have greater prognostic ability to measure early progression of structural and symptomatic changes in the joint over time and which are likely to predict treatment response better than the radiographic measurement of narrowing of joint space in knee OA patients. These new biomarkers are candidates for follow-on studies for evaluation and use in regulatory decision-making.
The goal of this project was to conduct a 75-patient study at a total of 15 centers to determine the reproducibility of the non-invasive technique of carotid magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI). Results established a standardized carotid MRI protocol and determined, for the first time, that kinetic parameters of carotid atherosclerotic plaque are reproducible and can be used for multi-center studies.
This is the first project in a two-stage strategy that seeks to characterize beta cell function for predicting long-term beta cell response to an intervention based on short-term measures. The first stage’s goal is to characterize key methodological issues in the assessment of beta cell function by evaluating Mixed Meal Tolerance (MTT) and Arginine Stimulation Tests against the standard Frequently Sampled Intravenous Glucose Tolerance (FSIGT) Test in a series of clinical studies.
The primary objective of this project was to determine whether a 30kDa adipocyte-secreted protein, adiponectin, has utility as predictive serum biomarker of glycemic control in normal non-diabetic subjects and patients with type 2 diabetes, following treatment with a novel and promising new class of compounds, PPARγ agonists. Results confirmed previous relationships between adiponectin levels and metabolic parameters, and support the robust and predictive utility of adiponectin across the spectrum of glucose tolerance.