Arthritis CRC picks up new funding and partners

The Cooperative Research Centre for Chronic Inflammatory Diseases has received AUD$5 million in supplementary funding from the federal government to implement two new programs.

Along with the new funding, commercial partner AstraZeneca renewed its collaboration with the CRC, providing extra funding and resources.

And two new industry partners, US-based orthopaedic devices company Zimmer and Melbourne transgenic mouse company IngenKO have joined the centre.

Prof John Hamilton, the CEO of the CRC, said the CRC applied for supplementary funding to expand into the area of osteoarthritis, complementing existing programs in rheumatoid arthritis and other inflammatory diseases including chronic pulmonary obstructive disease.

"We saw a huge clinical problem [failure of joint replacements] we thought we could address," he said. "It also provided more commercialisation options to us."

A second new program will focus on computational and structural biology techniques, to enhance research efforts.

The osteoarthritis program will emphasise elucidation of the molecular processes involved in the rejection of joint replacements and development of synthetic tissues to repair injured joints. A key feature of the research will be the development of treatments that assist the repair processes in the context of an inflammatory environment, tagged "tissue therapeutics" by Hamilton.

According to University of Melbourne professor Stephen Graves, director of orthopaedics at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, 50,000 joint replacements are performed every year in Australia, and 20-25 per cent of them eventually fail, primarily due to inflammation of the joint following surgery.

He has developed a method to use adult stem cells to help regrow bone and cartilage to repair damage due to arthritis and other conditions. The technique builds on work done by Dr Paul Simmons at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Institute in isolating the rare populations of stromal stem cells from the bone marrow, which can then be used to grow bone tissue in culture.

"The stem cell technique could help restore bone and cartilage lost due to the inflammation that occurs around the artificial joint. This would improve the results of joint replacement surgery," Graves said. "The technique could also be used to replace cartilage in arthritic patients, preventing the need for joint replacement in the first place."

According to Graves, the technique has been successfully tested on sheep, and the CRC hopes to commence human clinical trials next year. The CRC has also signed an in-principal agreement with the National Stem Cell Centre.

The potential market for the treatment is huge, with around 3 million Australians affected and joint replacement costs of $630 million and rising. In total, arthritis costs Australian healthcare $9 billion per year, and has been identified as a national health priority area by the Federal government.

Dr Martin Nicklasson, AstraZeneca's VP of global drug development, said the company was pleased to be associated with the world-class research at the CRC, noting that the first validated candidate targets for development of drugs to treat inflammatory diseases had already been delivered to the company for further investigation.

John Cooper, general manager of Zimmer for Australia and New Zealand said his company was excited to be involved with the research at the CRC. "If we can come up with a way to have the body accept joint replacements for 30 years, and not reject them, then we avoid the need for painful revision surgery," he said.

Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran announced the funding today.