$11.5m grant to help Qld researchers tackle rheumatoid arthritis

Queensland researchers will use an $11.5m grant to help create a therapy to relieve rheumatoid arthritis, aiming to move into clinical trials and have a treatment available within five years.

Australians are currently spending over a billion dollars in Rheumatoid Arthritis treatment with clinical trials set to get underway to eliminate the need for lifelong costly treatments and relieve suffers from chronic pain.

Researchers at the University of Queensland will receive $11.54 million through the Australian’s Government’s Frontier Health and Medical Research grant opportunity to further groundbreaking research into resetting the immune system in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis occurs when the body mistakes its own joint proteins as foreign and attacks them, causing joints to become swollen, stiff and painful.

It affects 450,000 Australians, causing pain, disability and early death.

Minister for Health and Aged Care Mark Butler. Photo: Martin Ollman

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said the treatment would be transformative and a world first for sufferers.

“I’m proud the Albanese government is supporting Australian researchers to take this ‘moonshot’ and hopefully turn the early promise of immunotherapy into a treatment that puts the disease in remission,” Mr Butler said.

Kamal Dissanayake, 55, was diagnosed with the disease after waking up last March with severe pain in his wrist that left him unable to move his fingers.

“I couldn’t button my shirt. I thought it was the finish of my career,” Mr Dissanayake said.

“It was really impacting me in the beginning, and I usually travel to sites, and I carry a little bit of heavy stuff, and couldn’t carry my laptop.

“The flares come in and go, but after a couple of weeks another flare comes in on another joint.”

Mr Dissanayake is now on a combination of methotrexate and hydroxychloroquine – both common treatments for rheumatoid arthritis

“At the moment I pay $30 to $60 a month for treatment,” he said.

Mr Dissanayake is excited about the possibility of a new treatment that could effectively put the disease in remission.

The project brings together experts in immunotherapy, clinical trials, clinical practice and consumers to progress groundbreaking research and technology.

If successful, the treatment would be available in the next five years.

Kamal Dissanayake at home. Picture, John Gass

Reset RA will develop what’s known as an antigen-specific tolerising immunotherapy. This instructs the immune system to tolerate joint proteins, with the vision that patients will be in remission after stopping treatment with conventional antirheumatic medicines.

Early-phase trials were promising and Reset RA will now develop a second-generation product for testing in future clinical trials.

Lead researcher Professor Ranjeny Thomas said she anticipated immunotherapy would improve the quality of life of the people, and will reduce the healthcare spend.

“The problem is people need to stay on those drugs for life, so what we’re developing is an immunotherapy so that we can take people who are doing well on their drugs, with the idea being we can take them off their other drugs,” she said.

Professor Thomas said the grant meant researchers could now accelerate work to ready Australians for clinical trials of ASITI-RA, an antigen-specific immunotherapy, developed to reprogram the immune system to sustain long-term remission in rheumatoid arthritis.

She said in the next two years the drug would be ready to manufacture and to start phase one clinical trials.

“The first one would look at safety and how it affects the immune system and after that we would be looking at how well it does work in terms of being able to control the disease long term,” Prof Thomas said.