AiArthritis — Autoimmune and Auto-Inflammatory Arthritis

Note: This is a republication of a blog post I wrote for Strand Life Sciences, published on 20/5/2021. The original can be found here.

Autoimmune and autoinflammatory arthritis (AiArthritis) are forms of autoimmune diseases that include inflammatory-driven arthritis as a major clinical component. This includes rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis, lupus and many more. About 300 million people worldwide have at least one form of an AiArthritis.

RA responds to early detection and treatment. Catching it within a magic 12-week window can lessen disease activity, prevent joint damage, and improve treatment response. Other types of AiArthritis are more complex — lupus, for example, has many manifestations, with 2 out of 3 people with lupus known to harbour arthritic symptoms. The good news is that many such symptoms respond to known treatments, including DMARDs (disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs) and corticosteroids. Patients can also be treated with a more targeted form of treatment called biologics. Most biologics are basically antibodies or heavy proteins that bind to specific forms of overactive immune cells in our body and shut them down. Biologic treatment, sometimes in combination with DMARDs, has proven to be effective and sometimes miraculous in treating a percentage of people with AiArthritic symptoms.

Key questions in research on autoimmune arthritis include:

• Can we detect these diseases early?

• What combination of symptoms and blood-based “biomarkers”would help early detection?

• How do these biomarkers vary between, for instance, lupus and psoriatic arthritis?

• Why do only some people respond to certain types of treatment, for eg: biologics?

• Is it possible to find biomarkers that predict who will respond to biologic treatment?