Rheumatoid arthritis is the most common inflammatory joint disorder, affecting over 60,000 people in Austria alone, with women being three times as likely to suffer from the condition as men. While treatment advances over the past decades have led to the development of numerous drugs with varying mechanisms of action, many patients still fail to achieve clinical remission due to a lack of tools to help find the right treatment, leaving their symptoms inadequately controlled.
Clinicians are left with a "trial-and-error" approach to therapy, where one drug is tested after another. While some biomarkers exist to help predict treatment outcomes, they are not yet suitable for routine clinical use or require invasive procedures.
In a long-standing collaboration, the team led by Giulio Superti-Furga at CeMM and the Medical University of Vienna has, for the first time, tested a precision medicine method that could enable more targeted and accurate therapy selection for rheumatoid arthritis and likely other autoimmune diseases. The findings, published in eBioMedicine, represent a major step forward in this field.
