Research Team Receives $1M Grant to Study & Potentially Revolutionize Osteoarthritis Treatment

The Arthritis Foundation has awarded a $1 million grant to a team of researchers from UCSF, the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. This grant will fund a study intended to research ACL tears in the knee, a major risk factor for developing osteoarthritis (OA). From this study, researchers have the potential to discover new tools and treatments to detect and reverse OA before symptoms appear. The grant opens up the door for the multi-institutional research team to revolutionize treatment for OA and begin a new era in drug discovery.

Our research team will use the grant from the Arthritis Foundation to determine the feasibility of monitoring joint health following ACL injuries with state-of-the-art technologies. The study will investigate whether new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have the ability to measure the molecular changes that begin immediately after an ACL tear.

Currently, we know that an estimated 200,000 people in the U.S. tear an ACL annually. This diagnosis is often followed by the onset of osteoarthritis within 10 to 20 years. Additionally, OA is the most common form of arthritis that results in disability. However, there presently are no medications to slow or stop OA and no tools to identify early stages of the disease.

This partnership is an integral part of the emerging field of precision medicine, which aims to harness the vast advances in technology, genetics and biomedical research to better understand the roots of disease and to transform heath care so that prevention, diagnosis and treatment are precisely tailored to individuals to develop targeted therapies and to improve care to patients worldwide.

To learn more about the study, please see here.