Helsinn, a Swiss pharmaceutical Group focused on building quality cancer care, and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have signed a strategic alliance on a broad, multi-year program of clinical studies in cancer supportive and palliative care.

MD Anderson, a comprehensive cancer hospital network, will conduct 14 studies into Helsinn programs with enrollment projects of 420 patients. The collaboration aims to investigate new uses and better outcomes for these programs for people with cancer in the supportive and palliative settings. This relationship will leverage MD Anderson's significant clinical expertise and access to world recognized key opinion leaders, providing Helsinn with an unparalleled network or oncology specialists.

The collaboration will focus on six major disease areas; fatigue, anorexia/cachexia, diarrhea chronic nausea, pruritus and chemotherapy-induced neuropathic pain in a five-year time frame.

Riccardo Braglia, Helsinn Group vice chairman and CEO, said, "We believe that this collaboration will allow us to explore new outcomes for our existing commercialized products and to explore alternative uses for our pipeline programs to maximize our chances of being able to offer new, innovative solutions to people with cancer."

"There is a great opportunity to develop new and effective drugs to treat the main symptoms caused by cancer, such as weight loss, fatigue, nausea, pain, pruritus, diarrhea and anorexia/cachexia," said Eduardo Bruera, M.D., chair of Palliative, Rehabilitation & Integrative Medicine at MD Anderson.