Project: Personalized medicine to tackle immune dysfunction in refractory juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Acronym	PerMIDRIAR (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2020-305)
Project Topic	Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is one of the most common chronic diseases in childhood affecting about 1 in 1000 children. While therapeutic options have dramatically increased, a substantial proportion of children with JIA do not achieve remission, resulting in a lifelong disease burden. Our consortium will focus on children with resistant disease and high-risk for poor outcome. We have assembled an international team that will capitalize on our existing worldwide standardization of data and sample collection, phenotype reporting and archiving systems catalyzed by the UCAN initiative (see below). Our unique advantage is the availability of well-established longitudinal cohorts in all participating countries (Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Italy), who have detailed phenotypic and biologic data collected in a standardized and prospective manner. Our network research program will include biomarker science linked to cellular mechanisms, novel analytical methods and socio-economic modeling. We will identify the subgroup of high-risk children from our cohorts and prospectively perform deep immune-phenotyping and single cell transcriptome analysis of immune cells of blood and arthritic joints in therapy-refractory patients together with multi-omic data (genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic). Evaluation of novel disease markers (miRNA) and cross-validation of recently identified disease markers (S100A12) will be performed. Additionally, we will characterize regional differences in access to medications and generate a comprehensive set of clinical, biologic and societal factors which are predictive of disease outcome in children with refractory JIA. The consortium will thereby identify key pathways – both biologic, clinical and societal which predict patients who are of particular risk for developing poor outcome. This is the first stop towards a personalized medicine approach to tailor individualized strategies to improve outcome for affected children.
Network	ERA PerMed
Call	3rd Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2020)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	RWTH Aachen University hospital	Coordinator	Germany
2	Ospedale Pediatrico Bambino Gesù	Partner	Italy
3	Karoliska Institute	Partner	Sweden
4	McGill University	Partner	Canada
5	Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital, University Medical Center Utrecht	Partner	Netherlands