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Project Topic
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Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a heterogenous clinical syndrome characterised by a burden for the individual (pain, functional impairment, co-morbidities) and for society (medication costs, reduced work ability). RA displays a significant variation in clinical presentation, response to therapy, and longer-term outcomes. With few and crude predictors available, our current means for an individualised strategy are limited. A personalised medicine (PM) approach to RA requires new biomarkers, and algorithms, to support diagnosis and choice of effective treatment. For PM to transform clinical rheumatology practice, new tools to bring such algorithms to patients and health care are needed. For a number of reasons, the prospects for PM in RA are now much better than only a few years ago, but require a comprehensive approach including novel data and stakeholder collaboration. ScandRA builds on our successful international collaboration that is a joint effort between academia, health care, patients, industry and SMEs in biomarker technologies, data interoperability and e-health, and on our preliminary results from discovery science to health care transformation. In the Scandinavian countries, we have collected enormous amounts of information on patients with RA in our longitudinal prospective registers and biobanks, the largest and most detailed world-wide. We are now uniquely positioned i) to make detailed clinical data on RA disease activity, treatment, and life-style available for joint analyses with novel genomic- and biomarker-data from blood samples from these cohorts, ii) to take the next step, towards integration of the emergent results into clinical practice. Planned work include i) knowledge generation from novel analyses of our RA data, ii) value creation through development of decision support tools based on these insights, and iii) work with the ethical, legal and social challenges that are necessary for successful implementation.
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