University Of Birmingham Gets Significant Funding To Study Arthritis Treatment Responses

Study in UK: The University Of Birmingham has received £3.5 million in funding to study why some arthritis patients respond better to the treatment and why others do not respond in the same way.

Johnson & Johnson has awarded £3.5 million in funding to the University Of Birmingham to study the responses to arthritis treatment. The university will take biopsies of patients both before and during treatment to understand why not all patients respond to the treatment in the same way and why some respond better while others do not get equal benefits of the same treatment.

Professor Andrew Filer, Translational rheumatology, University of Birmingham said, “Different patients respond to different drugs; so whilst it is good news for patients that there are many to try, it can be a long road until they find something that works. During this time their condition continues to progress and cause pain and discomfort. We hope that by the end of this study, we will understand much more about how different treatments work for different patients and will be able to recommend effective ways of matching the right treatments to the right patients sooner.”

University Of Birmingham Findings On Arthritis To Help In Clinical Decision Making

The study is expected to help in clinical decision-making for patients who are not responding well to the treatment. It will help the doctors to understand what happens to the patient's joints at the tissue level when they are getting the first line of therapies, it will also help them to make decisions about when to switch or add an additional drug for patients who are not responding well to the treatment.

"The study will use tissue rather than blood samples to help researchers to better understand what is happening at a cellular level in the joint in the joint itself when different patients are given different treatments. Researchers will make use of single cell and spatial technologies available through Birmingham Tissue Analytics to study the tissue biopsies taken," reads the university statement.

According to the university, this chronic condition affects more than 600,000 patients in England and costs around £4.8 billion per year to the UK economy because of work-related disability and health costs.

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