29 June 2017

Protocol submitted to Ethics Committee for APPROACH longitudinal study

The APPROACH teams in Norway and The Netherlands announced that they have submitted the APPROACH study protocol to the national ethics committees. The study can start after the committees pass their positive judgement on the research protocol and its execution.

In total, 300 patients from France, The Netherlands, Norway and Spain will be taking part in the two-year APPROACH longitudinal study ending in 2020. The focus will be on knee osteoarthritis (OA), as this has a high clinical burden and is a very common form of OA.  

APPROACH aims to identify which OA patients can expect to see their condition progress (if untreated), using well-established and newly-developed biological markers. This information will be used to identify patients who could take part in clinical trials of more personalized treatments for OA.

The ethics committees will review the scientific aspects of the study protocol against the objections and risks for the participants of the APPROACH longitudinal study. The teams in France and Spain will submit the study protocol this summer.