ArthroVision Inc. was founded in December 1999 by Jean-Pierre Pelletier, MD and Johanne Martel-Pelletier, PhD, world-renowned researchers in arthritis. Their work focuses primarily on the study of osteoarthritis, an arthritic disease characterized by articular cartilage degradation. They also founded ArthroLab Inc., a company engaged in the research and development of new therapeutics for the treatment of osteoarthritis. ArthroVision has developed a system that allows the precise measurement of cartilage thickness and volume from magnetic resonance images (MRIs) and the tracking of cartilage degradation over time. This technology is unique and represents a breakthrough for osteoarthritis research, as the current practice in this field generally relies on techniques such as X-rays, which provide only qualitative or semi-quantitative information that is often subject to interpretation. The initial development of ArthroVision’s technology took place through a three-year grant from ArthroLab Inc. and the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), involving the École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) and the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) Québec, Canada. R&D activities began in December 1998 at the Laboratoire en Imagerie Orthopédique (LIO), a multi-disciplinary research group (ETS/CHUM collaboration) specialized in image processing, modelling, and 3D reconstruction of anatomical structures of the musculoskeletal system. The technology developed by ArthroVision is generating a high level of interest from major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies involved in the development of new drugs that attempt to stop or reduce the progression of osteoarthritis. The interest from pharmaceutical companies is motivated by the fact that the use of ArthroVision’s innovative technology for clinical trials can markedly reduce the number of patients to be included in these trials and shorten the duration of such trial, leading to enormous savings in the development and marketing of new disease modifying osteoarthritis drugs (DMOADs). These achievements are possible because, with ArthroVision’s technology, the cartilage volume and thickness of each patient can be measured directly with an unprecedented level of accuracy and reliability. Volume measurements taken at different times are compared for each patient in order to assess disease progression. This represents a major improvement over most current methods, including those based on X-ray evaluation, which generally require large patient cohorts for an average period of two to five years, and provide results that are not as accurate as those obtained using ArthroVision’s technology. All rights reserved ArthroVision Inc.