Further Development, Validation and Commercialisation of an Osteoarthritis Model for Drug Discovery and Drug Screening.

Osteoarthritis is a painful and disabling disease of the joints. It principally affects the hands, hips and knees and is very common in most countries.

It is estimated that over 250 million people across the world have osteoarthritis which has a significant impact on global economies and healthcare systems.

Osteoarthritis is the most common form of arthritis in the UK, (around 8.75 million) affecting around a third of people aged 45 and over.

Within the next 10-years, the number of people with osteoarthritis is predicted to rise substantially as we are living longer and cases of obesity, which is linked to osteoarthritis, are also increasing. Currently, most treatments for osteoarthritis are restricted to pain relief. There are no drugs on the market that can reverse the disease or even halt its progression.

Ultimately, patients require a total joint replacement, if such an operation is possible.

This is mainly because osteoarthritis is a complex disease, often of unknown origin, involving many different types of cells and tissues in the joint.

Finding and testing new drugs to treat osteoarthritis is very difficult as it is hard to replicate these disease conditions in laboratory test systems.

Our project will advance a model of osteoarthritis that we have been developing over the last four years, to assess the effectiveness of drugs in treating the disease and aid in the replacement of animal testing for new osteoarthritis therapies. The tissues constituting the model are representative of different parts of a human joint, bone and cartilage.

In this application, we will further develop this model to include nerve cells in order to assess novel pain-relieving drugs, vital for the control of the disease. The bone and cartilage will be "printed" with nerve cells, in order to produce the 3D models.

A range of compounds will be used to activate the disease process, including neural activation, and drugs will then be introduced to evaluate their ability to stop or reverse osteoarthritis and pain sensitisation.

Our models will speed up the process of identifying effective anti-osteoarthritis drugs, improving significantly on existing laboratory tests and small animal models.