Arthritect: Advancing Precision Medicine of Inflammatory Arthritides through inflammatory biomarker sensing technology

** 背景：** 风湿性关节炎（RA）和银屑病关节炎（PsA）是影响1-2%人群的衰弱性疾病。不可逆的关节损伤建立这些条件保持无效管理或治疗的时间越长。超过三分之一患有这些疾病的人必须在症状开始的两年内停止工作。然而，从症状开始到看风湿病医生需要超过6个月。即使这样，40%的患者对可以阻止疾病进展的专家治疗的首次试验没有反应。患者必须尝试一种又一种的药物，直到他们找到一种有效的治疗方法。当有效的治疗开始时，成千上万的人（仅在英国）不幸地失去了工作，生活质量无可挽回地降低。目前，诊断RA/PsA需要血液检查，关节检查和成像（如超声或MRI）。这些测试是昂贵的，因此很少进行。目前还没有一种方法可以让患者自己定期检测活动性炎症（RA/PsA损伤的原因）。然而，如果这种方法确实存在，那么患有这些疾病的人将得到更快、更低成本的诊断（避免昂贵的方法，如MRI），并可以远程监测。如果我们能够测量新药物对关节炎症的影响，我们就可以更快地确定何时更换新药。创新：** Senti-Tech已经完成了确定这种方法的可行性工作。这笔赠款将使我们的方法能够发展到Artritect系统中。该系统使用生物阻抗传感器（测量身体区域的导电性;炎症的变化）以及创新的系统，使传感器和患者之间保持良好的接触。该系统将成为首个用于检测手部活动性炎症的患者使用系统。我们将联合收割机与人工智能决策支持系统结合，以提供有针对性的治疗见解。**结果：** 在这个赠款项目中，我们将改进我们的技术方法，并在患者中进行测试。我们将采纳他们的反馈意见，以提高系统的可用性。最后，我们将把这个改进版的Arthritect用于临床试验，以研究Arthritect是否可以检测到患者对新治疗的反应。Arthritect将实现虚拟风湿病病房，减轻患者和医院的负担。我们将通过更快地诊断RA/PsA来改善生活质量，并减少有效治疗的时间。

**Background:** Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) are debilitating conditions that affect 1-2% of people. Irreversible joint damage builds up the longer these conditions remain ineffectively managed or untreated. Over 1-in-3 people with these conditions have to stop work within two years of symptoms starting.Yet, it takes over 6 months from the start of symptoms to seeing a rheumatology doctor. Even then, 40% of patients do not respond to a first trial of specialist treatment that can halt the progression of the disease. Patients must instead try another and another variation of these medications until they find one which works.By the time effective treatment has started, hundreds of thousands of people (in the UK alone) are sadly out of work with irreparably reduced quality-of-life.Currently, diagnosing RA/PsA requires blood tests, joint examination, and imaging (such as Ultrasound or MRI). These tests are expensive and are therefore performed sparingly. There are no existing approaches which could be used by patients themselves to detect active inflammation (the cause of damage in RA/PsA) regularly.However - if such an approach did exist, then people with these conditions would be diagnosed faster and at lower cost (avoiding expensive approaches like MRI) and could be monitored remotely. If we could measure how inflammation in the joints is affected by new medications, we could work out faster when to change to a new drug.**Innovation:** Senti-Tech has completed feasibility work to determine just such an approach. This grant will enable use to develop our approach into the Arthritect system. This system uses bioimpedance sensors (which measure conduciveness of areas of the body; something which changes in inflammation) together with an innovative system to make good contact between the sensors and the patient.This system will be a first-of-its-kind patient-use system to detect active inflammation in the hands, We'll combine daily readings with an artificially intelligent decision support system to provide targeted treatment insights.**Outcomes:** In this grant project, we will refine our technological approach and test this with patients. We will incorporate their feedback improving system usability. Finally, we will take this refined version of Arthritect into a clinical trial to investigate whether or not Arthritect can detect if a patient is responding to a new treatment.Arthritect will enable virtual rheumatology wards, reducing the burden on patients and hospitals. We'll improve quality-of-life through faster diagnosis of RA/PsA and reduce the time-to-effective treatment.