A federal funding program has handed out $11.54m to Queensland researchers investigating an ‘immune reset’ treatment.
Aussie researchers investigating an “immune reset” treatment that could put rheumatoid arthritis into remission and eliminate the need for lifelong immunotherapy have been given an $11.54 million funding boost.
The funding will allow the University of Queensland-led Reset Rheumatoid Arthritis project to progress beyond its promising early-phase trials to develop a second-generation product for testing in future clinical trials.
The project, led by Professor Ranjeny Thomas, involves experts in immunotherapy, clinical trials, clinical practice as well as consumers.
Professor Thomas said the treatment had the potential to “transform patients’ lives and reduce the economic burden associated with rheumatoid arthritis”.
“This research has evolved over many years and we are so excited to receive this funding that will accelerate our progress,” she said.
The treatment is known as an antigen-specific tolerising immunotherapy, which instructs the immune system to tolerate joint proteins, with the vision that patients will be in remission after stopping treatment with conventional anti-rheumatic medicines.
“We can now accelerate work to ready us for clinical trials of ASITI-RA, an antigen-specific immunotherapy we developed to reprogram the immune system to sustain long-term remission in rheumatoid arthritis,” said Professor Thomas.
“Within two years, we expect to be able to start phase one clinical trials of the immunotherapy, which aims to reduce the need for lifelong immunosuppression.”
Professor Thomas told The Medical Republic that there was an urgent need to address the future burden of RA in Australia.
“The number of patients that are expected to be diagnosed by 2040 is going to increase by 1.5 times and our health spend is going to go up to $1.5 billion a year from where it is now,” she said.
“The problem really is not just the increase, but the fact that they all need this ongoing complex rheumatology care and our workforce isn’t expanding in the same way.
“We’re going to need a disruption to manage all of these patients and to do it better than we’re doing now.”
Professor Thomas said when people are currently diagnosed, their disease can often be very well controlled, but as time went on, that control was lost.
“And then people live with flares and live with complications, and that life is really timetabled by all the medications and so on and so forth.
“What we’re aiming to do is create a vaccine-like effect with an immunotherapy that’s delivered into the skin, which is rheumatoid specific, and which really targets the root cause of the disease, the autoimmunity, which will sustain remission.
“That’s the aim, is to go early in remission and sustain it, and then give us the opportunity to potentially allow people to come off their drugs.
“It’s quite difficult to do even when you’re in remission now, but really to try to make that more consolidated, so that people you know will stay in sustained remission and won’t get into those future cycles of problems.”
Professor Thomas said the research had the potential to be adapted to other autoimmune conditions with similar pathways to RA.
She stressed that the treatment was designed to be used in early RA, when the immune system will be most receptive.
“It becomes more difficult later on – the immune system becomes quite resistant later on, and we’re starting to understand that process, but I think that it’s going to need other types of strategies than what we’re trying to do here,” she told TMR.
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The funding has been provided through the Medical Research Future Fund’s Frontier Health and Medical Research (Frontiers) grant opportunity.
This funding program supports so-called ‘moonshots’ – ambitious, exploratory and groundbreaking research to solve challenging medical problems. Through the grant the government is supporting research with the potential to prevent and treat serious and incurable conditions.
Announcing the grant earlier this month, federal health minister Mark Butler said his government was proud to “take this ‘moonshot’ and hopefully reset the immune system of rheumatoid arthritis sufferers”.
“This would be transformative and a world first for people with rheumatoid arthritis,” he said.
