Detke Joins MedAvante as Chief Medical Officer

3/12/2009 1:28:00 PM

Former Eli Lilly executive Michael J. Detke, MD, PhD, is frequent presenter on the causes of failed clinical studies for central nervous system (CNS) therapeutics and methods for improvement

Hamilton, New Jersey (March 12, 2009) – MedAvante, Inc. the leader in centralized psychiatric patient evaluation, announced today that Michael Detke, MD, PhD, has joined the company as Chief Medical Officer and Director of the MedAvante Research Institute. Dr. Detke comes to MedAvante from Eli Lilly, Inc., in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he was Executive Director and head of early phase development of CNS therapeutics.

“We are honored to have Michael join our team,” says Paul Gilbert, Chief Executive Officer of MedAvante. “At Lilly, Mike led early phase development of one of the industry’s deepest and strongest pipelines of CNS products. His earlier work on Cymbalta® and Prozac® proves that he is a top-caliber scientist dedicated to developing CNS therapeutics. At MedAvante, Mike will apply his leadership abilities, scientific expertise, and commitment to quality assurance to help us deliver our leading-edge methodology for removing sources of bias and variability, increasing signal detection, and reducing the high rate of failed CNS trials.”

Dr. Detke says, “MedAvante holds great promise for ensuring the future success of CNS therapeutics. For decades and now acutely, our industry has struggled with the problems of rater bias and an inability to separate placebo response from active-drug response. MedAvante offers a potential powerful solution for these problems. Our methodology to substantially increase the efficiency of clinical studies can help bring new treatments to market for patients suffering from debilitating CNS diseases. Furthermore, it can help to elucidate efficacy further, to help patients and doctors understand, for example, the relative efficacy of different drugs for a disorder, or different doses of a drug.”

Prior to joining MedAvante, Dr. Detke worked for Eli Lilly Research Laboratories in Indianapolis, for more than 8 years, most recently as Executive Director overseeing all CNS products in early phase development for psychiatry, neurology and pain indications. He is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Indiana University School of Medicine, where he teaches and supervises medical students and residents in patient care. He is Research Associate at Harvard Medical School. He has been the principal investigator in numerous studies of CNS therapeutics. Dr. Detke has published more than 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals, and has served as a reviewer for numerous such journals. He is a member in prestigious scientific organizations such as ACNP and SOBP. He graduated summa cum laude with a BA and MS in Psychology at Yale University and his MD and PhD at the University of Pennsylvania; he completed his medical internship and psychiatry residency at Harvard University.

About MedAvante, Inc
MedAvante is a global provider of centralized expert psychological rating services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device industries. MedAvante is a pioneer in developing a solution for one of the most intractable problems in CNS clinical trials: the high rate of uninformative or failed studies. MedAvante applies unique methods to systematically remove potential sources of bias and variability from the assessment process. By centralizing assessments with expert, standardized, objective, clinical interviewers over MedAvante’s two-way, real-time, high-quality videoconferencing, MedAvante makes subjective assessments of drug efficacy increasingly objective. As a result, sponsors can achieve increased study power and reduced trial-failure rates enabling them to bring more effective CNS drugs to market sooner. MedAvante operates facilities in Hamilton, New Jersey; Los Angeles, California; and Madison, Wisconsin. MedAvante is backed by over $34 million in investor financing including $20 Million in growth financing by Goldman Sachs and Trevi Health Ventures. For more information about MedAvante, visit www.medavante.net.