An agreement between ERT and GE Healthcare has the former integrating the latter's QT Guard Plus Algorithm tool into its centralized cardiac safety EXPERT platform for identifying new drugs that have an effect on QT. The measurement of the QT interval, as required in clinical development for drugs, can be difficult and has led to the termination of promising drugs that showed some degree of QT prolongation in early studies, but otherwise did not demonstrate evidence of proarrhythmia, a harmful effect that can lead to a fatal disordered heartbeat known as Torsades de Pointes (TdP). GE's QT Guard Plus Algorithm identifies and quantifies characteristic changes in the shape of the T-wave found in drugs that produce TdP. The ability to perform this quantitative analysis can help to distinguish between drugs which are proarrhythmic and those which are not.

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