New tools for Biomarker Discovery Promise Personalized Treatment for Rheumatoid Arthritis

This webinar will outline an ongoing project to develop personalized treatment strategies for rheumatoid arthritis patients using miRNA profiling. 

Millions of patients with rheumatoid arthritis are treated with TNF-α inhibiting agents, but the response rate to these therapies is low (30 percent to 40 percent) and no tool exists to predict the treatment response.

In the study that will be discussed in this webinar, Dr. Eric Schordan, Head of the Molecular Diagnostic Department at Firalis and TcLand Expression, led a project that aimed to address this via miRNA profiling in RA patients.

Using the HTG EdgeSeq platform, Dr. Schordan and colleagues first identified sets of miRNAs that discriminate responders from non-responders to anti TNF-α therapy and then developed a panel called RABIOPRED that includes more than 2,100 mRNAs identified as predictors of anti TNF-α therapy.

In a study that enrolled 67 RA patients, Dr. Schordan and his team determined that miRNA profiling using the HTG EdgeSeq platform served as a useful tool for biomarker discovery and enabled them to build predictive models for response to anti-TNF-α drugs. 

In this webinar, Dr. Schordan will discuss the details of that study, as well as his team's plans to validate the panel in a multicentric prospective clinical study of 600 patients.

Speaker

Eric Schordan
Head of the Molecular Diagnostic Department at Firalis and TcLand Expression.

Speaker Biography

Eric received his PhD in molecular and cellular biology from University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, in 2005. After his PhD, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Heidelberg with the support of an IEF Marie-Currie fellowship and a position of researcher at the University Medical Center Greifswald in the field of molecular and cellular biology. He was selected in 2007 for the participation to the 57th Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau. In 2013 he joined Firalis to create the department of Molecular Diagnostics for the discovery, validation and qualification of nucleic biomarkers.