Solutions for the Future
Guerbet's ambition is to offer radiology professionals and patients innovative and safe solutions, whether for medicines, medical devices, digital solutions or AI.
Guerbet focuses its work on the two medical imaging segments of diagnostic imaging and interventional imaging. These two radiology activities are studied in the main therapeutic areas of oncology, cardiology and neurology.
The incidence of the main cancers (lung, breast, prostate, colorectal, liver) is rising steadily. This increase is linked to longer life expectancy and known risk factors (smoking, diet, stress, environment, etc.). This in turn is leading to an ever-earlier number of diagnostic tests, with the aim of improving patient care, living conditions and treatment follow-up. For example, the development of breast cancer care is a perfect illustration of the role played by different medical imaging modalities: MRI plays an essential role in screening and/or monitoring the disease. MRI plays an essential role in screening and/or monitoring the disease, speeding up diagnosis and significantly changing the treatment strategy, enabling the disease to go into remission without recurrence. In the same pathology, sentinel lymph node detection enables surgery to be limited to what is strictly necessary.
In certain types of cancer, such as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), Interventional Imaging is of immense service, enabling precise visualization and localization of liver lesions, often on an outpatient basis, and even the administration of anticancer agents within the tumoral lesions themselves, via the transarterial chemoembolization procedure.
The evaluation of cardiovascular disease using contrast-enhanced imaging is essential for exploring the consequences of serious pathologies on symptomatic patients and/or those with associated risk factors (obesity, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, stress, hypertension and smoking, etc.).
Diagnostic efficiency enables patients to be stratified according to their risk profile, and the presence or absence of clinical signs, in order to determine the most appropriate management approach: preventive monitoring, choice of monotherapy or combination of drugs, or major surgical or interventional strategy. In this specialty, Interventional Imaging, for example, involves the injection of a contrast medium to visualize the narrowed area of the vessel to be treated, accompany the endovascular procedure and immediately monitor the effectiveness of the dilatation achieved. This type of therapeutic intervention, less invasive for the patient and less costly for the community (hospitalization time, patient follow-up procedures), has replaced surgery in many cases.
MRI has made a name for itself in central nervous system (CNS) imaging, where it was first used to diagnose lesions invisible on X-ray scans. Contrast injections in CNS imaging enable the exploration of tumoral diseases (primary brain tumors or brain metastases of a primary cancer), inflammatory diseases (such as multiple sclerosis), degenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's disease), vascular diseases (such as stroke) or infectious diseases (such as brain abscesses). For most of these chronic pathologies, the drugs available to halt their progression are still inadequate. As a result, they represent a major public health challenge, given the ageing of the population, the lengthening of life expectancy and the heavy burden of caring for these dependent patients.
Interventional Imaging can also be used to treat a large number of cerebral arteriovenous malformations successfully and non-surgically.
Scientific partnerships worldwide
Guerbet maintains close relations with the scientific and medical community, especially with doctors and hospitals.
This collaboration takes two main forms. Firstly, it takes place within the framework of clinical developments designed to bring out new therapeutic indications or to punctuate the traditional stages linked to the development of Guerbet's future products. The other facet of Guerbet's collaboration with the medical profession concerns the management of medical affairs involving various forms of financial support. This takes two main forms: the deployment of studies sponsored by healthcare establishments. In return for the publication of scientific articles, as well as the development of educational the development of educational programs involving exchanges of healthcare professionals
worldwide in partnership with learned societies. These educational come from the American Society of Immuno-oncology (SIO), which funds which funds research programs in immuno-oncology, the GEST Group (Global Embolization Symposium & Technologies), which operates in Europe and the United States and the South American sobrice society (Brazilian Society of Interventional Radiology), both of which fund vascular embolization research programs.