Personalised medicine in RA by combining genomics, biomarkers, clinical and patient-data from the Scandinavian countries, and by integrating the knowledge generated into routine care

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a heterogenous clinical syndrome, a burden for the individual and for society. RA displays a significant variation in clinical presentation, response to therapy, and longer-term outcomes.

With few and crude predictors available, our current means for an individualised strategy are limited.We will address these limitations, which will require not only new biomarkers and decision algorithms, but also the development and implementation of tools to bring such algorithms to patients and to health care.

Our consortium builds on a successful international collaboration across academia, health care, patients, industry and SMEs in biomarker technologies, data interoperability and e-health.In the Scandinavian countries, we have collected enormous amounts of information on patients with RA in our longitudinal prospective registers and biobanks, the largest and most detailed world-wide.

We are now uniquely positioned to make detailed clinical data on RA disease activity, treatment, and life-style available for joint analyses with novel genomic- and biomarker-data from blood samples from these cohorts, and to take the next step, towards integration of the emergent results into clinical practice.Planned work include i) knowledge generation from novel analyses of our RA data, ii) value creation through development of decision support tools, and iii) work with the ethical, legal and social challenges necessary for successful transformation of clinical practice.