NIH grants Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation $5.8 million for Sjögren’s research
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The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has received a $5.8 million award from the NIH for research into the diagnosis and management of Sjögren’s disease, according to a press release.
OMRF researchers Darise Farris, PhD, Joel Guthridge, PhD, and Christopher Lessard, PhD, were awarded the 4-year grant through the Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Autoimmune and Immune-Mediated Diseases Program (AMP AIM). The group aims to develop less invasive tools for diagnosis and identify new therapeutic targets for Sjögren’s disease, which has no cure.
“This disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose,” Lessard, who has been studying Sjögren’s disease at OMRF since 2007, said in the release. “It shares features with many autoimmune diseases and lacks effective diagnostic markers, which makes studying it challenging. This grant provides us with technology to analyze the salivary glands of people with Sjögren’s in a way that wasn’t possible previously.”
According to the release, the team will analyze blood and biopsy samples, which were donated to OMRF by people with Sjögren’s disease, to further understand genetic and molecular signatures.
“This knowledge should help clinicians diagnose the disease more easily and determine who may benefit from different potential therapies,” Guthridge said in the release.
A critical component of the OMRF research will focus on more accurate identification of individuals with positive or negative Sjögren’s autoantibodies. Misdiagnosis can lead to expensive, invasive and often unnecessary biopsies.
“Of the more than 600 people seen in our research clinic who met the criteria for Sjögren’s, about 40% tested negative for these autoantibodies,” Farris, the Alvin Chang chair of biomedical research at the OMRF, said in the statement. “This positions us to study the molecular issues unique to that particular Sjögren’s patient group.”
AMP AIM is a public-private partnership involving the NIH and the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health, in addition to nonprofit organizations, pharmaceutical companies and more than 50 research institutions.
The OMRF program is funded at a level of more than $60 million.
Other contributors include the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the Oklahoma City-based Presbyterian Health Foundation, the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science & Technology and the Oklahoma Center for Adult Stem Cell Research.
References:
OMRF receives $5.8 million for autoimmune disease research
https://omrf.org/2024/01/02/omrf-receives-5-8-million-for-autoimmune-disease-research-2/