Oxford BioDynamics, Plc announced it is collaborating with the King's College London team in the immediate follow up of the APIPPRA trial, the largest RA prevention trial to date. The APIPPRA trial of Abatacept was a multicentre trial in 213 individuals at high risk of rheumatoid arthritis. Break-through results of the trial were recently published in The Lancet in February 2024 [1] and covered in the mainstream media (linkshereandhere).

Prof Andrew Cope, who led the research, commented:"The APIPPRA trial is the largest rheumatoid arthritis prevention trial to date, and the first to show a treatment effective in preventing the onset of disease in people at risk. In the immediate follow-up of the successful trial, The King's College London team has now engaged OBD's EpiSwitch® technology,which has already delivered successful results on prognosis of disease and prediction of response to treatment [2,3],to identify which patients are at the highest risk of progressing to RA and are likely to benefit from the therapeutic intervention with Abatacept, in both the short and long term. While 92.8% of those treated with Abtacept were RA-free at the end of year 1, about 25% of this group ultimately progressed to rheumatoid arthritis by the end of the second year after stopping treatment.

This highlights the importance of an accurate risk assessment and the need for improved stratification tools to identify those individuals who will have the benefit of a durable, efficacious response - a task well-suited to EpiSwitch® biomarkers developed by OBD.