Charting the course for rheumatology this year
Dr. Merrill also said that the trend of certain patient advocacy groups playing a larger role in setting the research and practice agendas will continue to grow. The Lupus Foundation of America (LFA), for example, has mobilized companies to share data from placebo groups to improve clinical trial designs, created an online training site for clinical trialists worldwide, formed a Congressional Lupus Caucus, initiated a national ad campaign to educate about lupus, funded an international project to come up with a definition for lupus flare, funded the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics project to revise the classification criteria for lupus, and the list goes on – they have had a major impact on lupus. The LFA (and also some other organizations such as the Lupus Research Institute and Lupus Awareness and Research) also fund basic and clinical research in lupus.
"The LFA has done so many specific, innovative things to ‘bring down the barriers’ to treatment development in a complex and heterogenous disease where clinical trial design has been a tough nut to crack," said Dr. Merrill, noting that the foundation’s work "serves as a template for what can be done in other underserved rheumatic diseases."
Dr. Furst is the Carl M. Pearson Professor of Rheumatology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Boumpas is professor of medicine and director of internal medicine/rheumatology at the University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece, and is acting clinical director of the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal, and Skin Diseases. Dr. Gaylis is in private practice in Aventura, Fla. Dr. Merrill is program chair of the clinical pharmacology research program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation and is professor of medicine at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. All have financial relationships with numerous pharmaceutical companies that have products that are relevant to rheumatology.
