Maximising Impact of Prescription Drugs in Rheumatoid Arthritis

The SQUEEZE consortium comprehensively addressed how biomarkers can be used to optimize disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a chronic immune-mediated disease with enormous health-related quality of life and socioeconomic impact.

A broad choice of DMARDs with different targets is up to date available in clinical care, however without sufficient markers indicating the best choice for a particular patient, treatment strategies can be ineffective, cumbersome and expensive.

The team of leading academic centres with a first-class record in translational and clinical research, together with patients and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) has set out to deliver a collaborative programme to advance the clinical application of biomarkers to improve benefit, safety, and value of approved DMARDs.

SQUEEZE utilizes models from data science, clinical trials, translational science, and behavioural science to engage in a complementary, synergistic, and non-overlapping manner addressing the use of biomarkers to improve the ability to select the DMARD with the highest likelihood of fitting the immunophenotypic and clinical profile of the patient, to optimise dose and route of existing DMARDs; and to inform an innovative model of care focusing on patient´s preferences and needs to increase adherence to prescribed drugs.

Through nine dedicated work packages SQUEEZE integrates to validate clinical, laboratory, molecular, digital and behavioural biomarkers to enable the recognition of patients with high likelihood of response to treatment and the selection of the drug with highest chance of benefit for an individual patient; and as such improve efficacy and safety of existing therapies (by squeezing the most out of existing drugs) in synergy with other EU-wide activities.