About
Work packages
All APPROACH activities are designed to validate and qualify methods and criteria for osteoarthritis (OA) patient stratification and potential diagnostic application. The backbone of APPROACH is a large set of existing measures that come from existing ongoing cohorts of which some have been designed around a specific subset of OA patients, e.g. knee OA, hand OA or obese subjects. An important element of the work of the consortium will be to define a set of guidelines that enable prediction models to support new DMOAD trials, with medication that is specifically designed for subsets of phenotypically different OA patients.
To reach its objectives, the APPROACH project has been divided into 4 work packages:
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Work package 1: Bioinformatics
WP1 focuses on the development of an integrated bioinformatics platform that functions as a repository of clinical data, biomarker data, images, as well as storage of bio-tissues from a broad spectrum of OA patients. -
Work package 2: Biochemical marker discovery, validation and testing
WP2 focuses on, proteomics, metabolomics and lipidomics analyses to identify novel and current (validated) markers for validation and qualification. -
Work package 3: Cohort & imaging
WP3 covers different OA aetiologies (phenotypes) in numbers that fulfil basic requirements for further statistical and bioinformatics studies, which will be performed in WP1. -
Work package 4: Management
WP4 is the consortium management layer, which will ensure optimal collaboration between partners and relevant stakeholders, and knowledge exchange between the WP's.