Boston Life finalizing registration plans for Altropane

By Jennifer Lanning Drey

Portland, Ore., Nov. 2 - Boston Life Sciences, Inc. is working with the Food and Drug Administration to finalize a registration plan for the Altropane molecular imaging agent as a diagnostic tool for Parkinson's disease, Kenneth Rice, Boston Life's chief financial officer, said Thursday at the Mass Opportunities biotechnology investment conference.

The company also is in discussions with potential commercialization partners in an effort to optimize the product's opportunity in the marketplace, Rice said.

Boston Life expects Altropane to be the first diagnostic of its type on the market in the United States.

The company also is finalizing the details of a registration trail that will test Altropane as a diagnostic tool for adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and hopes to begin initiating sites for that trial in the first half of 2007, Rice said.

Boston Life has completed seven clinical trials of Altropane involving 525 individuals, Rice said.

The company's most recent trial in Parkinson's showed that the Altropane diagnostic was statistically significant over the diagnosis of primary care physicians on measures of both specificity and sensitivity.

The trial was designed to assess whether Altropane imaging is more accurate than the clinical diagnosis of primary care physicians to distinguish between tremors caused by Parkinsonian Syndrome and those associated with other disorders, as judged by comparison to a definitive diagnosis by movement disorder specialists.

Deeper in its pipeline, Boston Life is performing preclinical work to develop additional products that would provide more effective management of Parkinson's disease symptoms and slow or arrest the disease.

The company hopes to report specific findings from the preclinical work within the next nine months and has a goal of being in the clinic in 2008 with a product initially targeting symptom management, Rice said.

Boston Life Sciences is a medical research company based in Hopkinton, Mass.

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