New medicines hope in joint disease fight

A GROUND-BREAKING study involving a leading Yorkshire academic could help improve understanding of why some people are more likely to develop a painful joint disease than others.

Professor Mark Wilkinson, inset, a Professor of Orthopaedics at Sheffield University, has taken part in the largest ever genetic study of osteoarthritis, a degenerative condition suffered by almost 10 million people in the UK, which limits the movement of joints.

For the study, scientists at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, GSK and collaborators including Prof Wilkinson, analysed the genomes of more than 77,000 people with osteoarthritis.

Their research uncovered 52 new genetic changes linked to the disease, doubling the number of genetic regions associated with the condition.

The team believes the findings could help identify starting points for new medicines. Prof Wilkinson said: “Osteoarthritis is the leading cause of chronic disability worldwide and this study represents the largest genetic epidemiological study to date in our attempts to understand what makes one person more likely to develop the disease than another.

“The only treatment we currently have for persistently symptomatic osteoarthritis is joint replacement. With the work presented here we are moving the science forward to our goal to improve the lives of patients who live with osteoarthritis.”