Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and MedAvante Announce Alliance

LAS VEGAS and HAMILTON, N.J., July 11, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and MedAvante, Inc. announced a collaborative alliance using MedAvante's centralized clinical trial services to optimize testing of treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD), Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, Director of the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health and one of the world's leading Alzheimer's disease researchers, said the combination of capabilities will advance signal detection in neurocognition.

"Measuring relatively small changes in cognitive performance over prolonged periods of time is an extremely difficult challenge," Dr. Cummings said.  "Standardizing research assessments will help us to produce higher quality research data with less error, which ultimately will translate into more advanced treatments for patients."

Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, which specializes in care of patients with neurocognitive deficits and developing new therapies, will implement MedAvante central trial services for controlling subject selection and endpoint data collection.

MedAvante central trial services are designed to achieve consistent and uniformly high assessment data quality across sites and studies. The alliance provides for additional collaboration by MedAvante's senior scientists with Dr. Cummings to study the impact of signal detection processes on outcome data.

"This agreement emphasizes the value of scientifically rigorous methodologies MedAvante has developed and implemented for various clinical trials in AD and MCI as well as psychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia," said Paul M. Gilbert, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of MedAvante.

"MedAvante has scientific and operational capabilities in place to enhance signal detection," Gilbert said.  "Joining forces with one of the field's leading advanced clinical research centers will certainly lead to further innovations in subject recruitment and high quality outcome data."

About Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health

Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health provides state-of-the-art care for cognitive disorders and for the family members of those who suffer from them. The physicians and staff at the Center for Brain Health continuously work towards the development of early diagnosis and the advancement of knowledge concerning mild cognitive disorders, which could one day delay or prevent their onset.  Patients receive expert diagnosis and treatment at the Center for Brain Health, which offers a multidisciplinary patient-focused approach to diagnosis and treatment, promoting collaboration across all care providers, offering patients a complete continuum of care and infusing education and research into all that it does. The facility, designed by Frank Gehry, houses clinical space, a diagnostic center, neuroimaging rooms, physician offices, laboratories devoted to clinical research and the Keep Memory Alive Event Center.  For more information, visit www.clevelandclinic.org/brainhealth.

About MedAvante, Inc.

MedAvante is the leading global provider of centralized expert psychiatric and neurocognition rating and monitoring services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.  MedAvante solutions help sponsors achieve enhanced assay sensitivity for increased drug effect and reduced trial failure rates, enabling them to bring better drugs to market faster. With headquarters in Hamilton NJ and operations hubs in Moscow and Munich, MedAvante delivers central trial services in more than 20 countries worldwide from within each country.  For more information, please visit www.medavante.com.

SOURCE MedAvante, Inc.