Professor Adam Croft has been awarded £392,004.48 by Versus Arthritis for the project ‘Early Detection of Severe Disease in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis’. Starting on 1st August 2023 and running for three years, this funding aims to advance our understanding and treatment of Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA).
As part of the Versus Arthritis funded Multiomic Analysis of Paediatric Gut and Joint Inflammation (MAPJAG) study, Prof Adam Croft pioneered the application of a safe, well-tolerated technique for minimally invasive ultrasound-guided synovial tissue biopsies in children and young people with inflammatory arthritis. In this project, the research team defined the cellularity of the synovial tissue at single-cell (sc) resolution using scRNA-sequencing of digested tissue from individuals with an actively inflamed joint. This new funding will allow analysis to extend to matched blood and synovial fluid samples and fund complementary spatial analysis of matched tissue.
This study is embedded into the TRICIA network and will draw on the intellectual infrastructure across four academic institutions; Oxford, UCL, UoB, and Manchester
