Qualification of ultrasonography as a biomarker of prognosis and response to therapy in rheumatoid arthritis

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Rheumatoid arthritis is a progressively disabling disease affecting about 1% of the population. There have been considerable advances in treatment, although the new biologic therapies are not effective in about one-third of patients. Furthermore, biologic treatments such as anti-TNF are administered by injection and are very costly, such that there is rationing in the UK. Only those patients with the most active disease become eligible, despite the particular effectiveness of this type of treatment in preventing progressive joint damage. There is an unmet need to develop biomarkers that will allow a doctor to accurately predict which patients are likely to have rapid and progressive joint destruction, so that these patients can be treated with the most effective preventative treatments available without having to wait until they have had disease for some time, by which stage the damage is already done and largely irreversible. Firstly, we want to look at a simple, non-invasive ultrasound technique that gives information about blood flow as such a predictive tool to identify poor prognosis patients. Secondly, because not all patients respond to the available therapies and the expensive ones are not as widely available as would be ideal, there is a need for new, affordable drugs. However, the drug development process itself is very costly and it is not always straightforward to prove that any improvements in disease after drug intervention are due to the drug itself without testing it on very large numbers of patients. Therefore, we seek to investigate the potential of ultrasound measures of blood flow to give a sensitive, early, and reliable indication of response to new treatments in smaller numbers of patients. If this approach is successful, the findings will have wider implications for more cost-effective approaches to new drug testing in future to (a) make new drug discovery for rheumatoid arthritis more efficient, and (b) minimize patient exposure to drugs that have turned out to have no significant benefit.