SCREEN DREAM OMRF develops patientscreening model for OA clinical trials
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steoarthritis is among the world’s most diagnosed diseases, affecting an estimated 7% of the global population. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says roughly 32.5 million American adults live with the condition, making it the nation’s leading cause of disability. Still, no medications exist to slow or stop OA. Currently available approved drugs treat only short-term symptoms of OA and don’t target the underlying causes or long-term progression of the disease. The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation aims to change that. Conducting effective clinical trials presents a major hurdle in the development of drugs to alter the underlying disease process. Such trials typically require thousands, or tens of thousands, of participants and take decades to complete, as the disease does not progress uniformly. This can render the assessment of investigational OA drugs extremely difficult – and expensive. “The entire field of OA research has been trying to develop predictive models for that small percentage of patients whose disease will rapidly progress over a much shorter time – ideally two years – because those are the ones you need for clinical trials,” said OMRF physician-scientist Matlock Jeffries, M.D. Dr. Jeffries has created such a screening process. His invention could be a game-changer for clinical trials by drastically reducing the time, the number of participants, and the cost of testing new OA drugs. “My main goal is to empower pharmaceutical companies who are dissuaded from entering the OA market because of the total time currently needed for clinical trials,” he said. Dr. Jeffries’ lab focuses on epigenetics, specifically, the methylation of DNA – a biological process by which methyl groups are added to the DNA molecule without changing its genetic sequence. He based his model on DNA methylation data obtained from several hundred OA patients. Users can extrapolate the data for comparison against the blood samples of prospec16
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OMRF physician-scientist Matlock Jeffries, M.D., uses a liquid nitrogen tank, which operates at the extremely cold temperatures needed for storage of human tissue and other samples.
tive clinical trial participants. The patented process predicts the future progression of pain and joint space narrowing. “Our accuracy is in the 80% range, and the big advantage of our model is that it allows for a blood draw at a single point in time when all the patients look the same,” Dr. Jeffries said. “We can pull out which of those patients are going to show disease progression in the next two to three years, which is exactly what you want from a clinical trial perspective. I believe this model provides that level of certainty.” He’s now working on a new test that would provide the same level of predictability at a reduced cost. “And then after that, the next step is applying the same technique to a different OA subset,” Dr. Jeffries said. “This initial model is
based on patients who were already experiencing pain and joint narrowing. So now the question is, can you take a person who currently has none of those symptoms and predict whether they will develop OA in the next couple of years.” To learn more about licensing opportunities for this technology, contact Hemangi Shah, Ph.D., OMRF’s technology development specialist, at hemangi-shah@omrf.org.
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