VIDEO: ‘Tantalizing advances’ in gut microbiome research in RA space

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 Rheumatoid arthritis, recently, the development has been in the space of omics technologies and how those apply to a understanding of the disease and also to predicting response to medications. I think there have been a lot of tantalizing advances in the space of microbiome research and really looking at gut microbial factors and how they relate to disease and both prognosis in terms of responding to medications and responding to changes in disease activity over time. So that's been in advance. We now can say that there's definitely a link between the gut microbiome and the course of rheumatoid arthritis, and we've shown that in our group and others have as well, so I think that's an exciting area. Another area has been in the advent of newer technologies to apply to synovial biopsies and work that have been done by investigators in the United States and Europe, looking at synovial histopathology using single-cell omics technologies and transcriptomics have really showed a real diversity of different cell types in synovium, looking at different macrophage subsets, T cells, B cells, plasma cells, and even other different cell types, such as NKT cells, for example, play a role in different patient subsets. And we see quite a heterogeneity at a patient level and population level in synovial biology. I don't think we have any major advances in how we diagnose or treat RA yet based on synovial histopathology, but I think that time is coming and I think work that is progressing in that space, is going to lead to new ways that we diagnose RA, classify RA and ultimately treat RA in the next five to 10 years. So stay tuned on that front.