There was plenty of news and a call out for more participants to join an exciting new trial on tapering biologics or targeted-synthetic drugs.
Adelaide this week played host to the Australian Arthritis and Autoimmune Biobank Collaborative’s (A3BC) annual collaborators meeting.
The meeting coincided with the launch of the Australia & New Zealand Musculoskeletal (ANZMUSC) Clinical Trials Network’s Inflammatory Arthritis Special Interest Group.
The ANZMUSC was also in Adelaide this week at the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute for its annual scientific meeting.
The A3BC’s coordinating principal investigator and director, Professor Lyn March, said the meeting had been a huge success.
“We had two really exciting pilot studies, including one that is a poster at ACR, which is exciting for one of the PhD students, where we’ve done some preliminary analysis of the peripheral blood mononuclear cells in people with rheumatoid arthritis for starting compared to normal control,” Professor March told Rheumatology Republic.
“So we’ve got one cohort in established rheumatoid and we found really quite distinct PBMC patterns amongst those whose disease is well controlled compared to those whose disease is still a bit too active.”
Professor March, a consultant rheumatologist and Liggins Professor of Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Epidemiology in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney, said there had also been a number of presentations from researchers sharing a plethora of new and diverse ideas “right across the range of qualitative work”.
The delegates also heard about a new tapering trial which is currently at the recruitment stage.
“It was funded by the Medical Research Future Fund in their initiative that was called better use for existing medicines,” Professor March told RR.
“The biologic tapering trial is for patients with rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis who are well controlled on their therapy, and just trying to analyse whether we could taper successfully.
“From our knowledge around the world, you know maybe only 20-30% will be able to come off their drugs. But what we really want to find out is, can we predict from baseline, and if we capture those people when they’re flaring or and we recapture their flare just what’s changing in their blood.
“So we’re collecting blood, so we’ll have their PBMCs, we’ll have their cytokines profiles, and we’ll have their microbiome profiles to see if we can predict from baseline, those who it will be safe to do that in [tapering] and those where we probably shouldn’t do that because of their particular profile.”
Professor March said recruitment was already underway but the researchers were still well short of their target.
“We’re getting nodes set up around Australia, so there’ll be 11 recruiting sites,” she said.
“Many of our members are in private practice, but there are opportunities for them to contribute if they can, either sending them in through the collaborating centres, or if they’re close to a collaborating centre, we can probably work out with some of them to recruit from their private practise.”
“There’s a real opportunity for some private practitioners to participate in the research, if they’re interested. And I think we’ll get some really valuable information that might help inform the health policy and how we can access the medicines in in Australia.”
The 24-month trial is seeking participants who have well-controlled RA and PsA on biologic or targeted-synthetic drugs. There are study sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Canberra.
Other eligibility criteria is available on the recruitment page here.
The A3BC is a national biobanking and information network committed to improving the health of men, women and children living with arthritis and autoimmune conditions.
It collects a broad range of linked biological information (e.g. genetics, microbiome), patient-reported details (via the ARAD Registry), and medical data.
Collected data and biological samples are deidentified, processed, stored and made available for ethics-approved, open-access research into understanding causes and improving treatment and prevention towards finding cures for arthritis and autoimmune conditions.
