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APPROACH final project report available
The APPROACH consortium publishes a final project report reflecting on its scientific and technical results, the potential impact and exploitation of these results, as well as the lessons learned and further opportunities for research in the field of osteoarthritis.
It has been suggested that 10% of men and 18% of women above 60 suffer from osteoarthritis (OA), and a quarter of those affected struggle to carry out ordinary daily activities. Despite the large and growing burden of this disease, many pharmaceutical companies have reduced or altogether abandoned drug development. One of the problems is that there are currently no reliable ways of measuring whether a specific treatment is working or not. This is partly because the mechanisms that lead to the disease in different subgroups of patients, are poorly understood. Moreover, although the current mind-set for treatment in this field is moving towards personalized medicine, there are no accepted methods of classifying the patients according to diagnosis methodology, prognosis and treatment plan.
The APPROACH consortium used a combination of biomedical data for more than 10,000 OA patients and heathy people from 8 existing cohorts into a unified bioinformatics platform with the aim of identifying different OA phenotypes. These phenotypes were then be validated in a longitudinal cohort using existing and newly-developed biomarkers. This enables the development of guidelines for differentially diagnosing the right patient for the right treatment.
The project ran for 6.5 years, from June 2015 to November 2021. The overall objectives of the consortium were:
- Implement and establish a new, integrated and comprehensive database platform of existing data from partners that will be extended with newly collected longitudinal data, incorporating novel high-quality biomarkers.
- Define subsets of (phenotypically) different patients in the existing cohorts and refine these in the successive new longitudinal extension cohort and subsequently identify the “right patient” to treat for each subset/phenotype via innovative stratification techniques.
- Optimize, introduce and validate the next generation imaging methodologies (modality + postprocessing), human motion analysis and biochemical assays to enable more efficient and reliable diagnoses and treatment of OA patients, refining stratification of phenotypes.
- Identify mechanistic targets for patient subsets, create prediction models and establish guidelines for a disease modifying osteoarthritis drug (DMOAD) development that forms the roadmap for OA.
The executive summary of the final APPROACH project report is available here.