Efforts towards a precision medicine approach in juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Abstract

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the commonest group of childhood arthritides. Despite the availability of advanced therapeutics, many children and young people (CYP) with JIA experience disease flares, and in some, chronic joint damage. Tailoring treatment based on unique biological profiles would benefit CYP with JIA given their variable clinical presentation and disease course. To date, biomarkers to predict treatment response are lacking. With advances in single cell technologies, we are now able to profile the genes and proteins of target tissues at unprecedented resolution to define the biological basis of disease and guide novel treatment approaches. The complex analyses and combination of biological and clinical outcome data from large datasets across disease phenotypes have become possible with the development of computational and machine learning methods. Here, we summarise the strategies to integrate data through enable multimodal based approaches to maximise precision medicine and research priorities for CYP with JIA.