This site is intended for UK healthcare professionals
Medscape UK Univadis Logo
Medscape UK Univadis Logo
News

UK-wide CLUSTER Consortium on juvenile arthritis to launch next month

A major UK-wide clinical research consortium on juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is set to launch next month.

The CLUSTER (Childhood arthritis and associated uveitis: stratification through endotypes and mechanism) Consortium will bring together experts from six UK universities with the ultimate aim of developing new targeted treatments for JIA and JIA-associated uveitis.

The initiative has been awarded £5 million from the Medical Research Council, with partnership funding from Arthritis Research UK. The five-year project will analyse data from national studies and clinical trials to identify genetic alterations, immune cell differences, blood proteins and clinical features that can be used as biomarkers of treatment response. It is expected that the work will also the design of future clinical trials.

The research will build on the work of MRC-supported Childhood Arthritis Response to Treatment (CHART) consortium which included data from 5,000 patients with JIA.

The 10 CLUSTER co-investigators are Prof Lucy Wedderburn and Prof Andrew Dick from University College London; Prof Wendy Thomson, Prof Kimme Hyrich, Dr Nophar Geifman and Prof Souyma Raychaudhuri from the University of Manchester; Dr Chris Wallace from the University of Cambridge; Dr Michael Barnes from Queen Mary's University of London; Prof AV Ramanan  from the University Hospitals Bristol NHS Foundation Trust; and Prof Michael Beresford, professor of child health at the University of Liverpool and Director of the UK's first and only Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centre for Children.

Commenting on the project, Prof Louise Kenny, Executive Pro-Vice-Chancellor for the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences at University of Liverpool, said: "We expect this collaboration to be highly effective as we work together over the next five years to develop the stratified medicine solutions required for the challenges faced by young people with arthritis and related rheumatic disorders locally, nationally and internationally."


References


YOU MAY ALSO LIKE