$60 Million Initiative Seeks Better Understanding of Knee Osteoarthritis

A $60.8 million, public-private partnership will soon get under way that could help speed the development of drugs for osteoarthritis.

The Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI) will be conducted at four clinical centers: the University of Maryland School of Medicine, Ohio State University, University of Pittsburgh and Memorial Hospital of Rhode Island.

These institutions will establish and maintain a database for osteoarthritis that will be available to researchers worldwide. The University of California at San Francisco will be responsible for coordinating all of the data.

The initiative will last seven years and involve 5,000 recruits over the age of 50 who are at high risk of developing symptomatic knee osteoarthritis.

"Osteoarthritis is the No. 1 disabling condition among older adults," said Dr. Rebecca Jackson, the principal investigator on the project for Ohio State University. "Despite that, we really don't understand the factors that contribute to why it occurs or what makes it worse."

Jackson said the initiative is needed to explain why the disease has a crippling effect with little pain for some patients and a lot of pain with minimal physical limitations for others.

Dr. C. Kent Kwoh, the principal investigator for the University of Pittsburgh's participation in the study, said the ultimate goal of the initiative is to identify biomarkers of disease risk and/or progression.

"These biomarkers are critical to the development of new therapies to halt the progression of osteoarthritis," Kwoh said. "Our current treatments address only symptoms such as pain without changing the course of the disease."

Funding for the initiative will come from the National Institutes of Health and the pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis and Pfizer.

Ohio State's recruitment of 1,250 individuals between the ages of 50 and 79 will begin in May, with ethnic minorities expected to make up at least 20 percent of the study participants.

Dr. Kwoh said the Arthritis Institute at the university would start recruiting between 1,250 and 1,500 participants next spring to undergo periodic x-ray and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations to reveal any physical changes in the knee joint along with blood draws to identify biomarkers.

Other sources: National Institutes of Health, University of Pittsburgh, Ohio State University