KNAW award for Shahab Abtahi to explore improved research methods for preventing rheumatoid arthritis.

This month dr. Shahab Abtahi, from the Pharmacoepidemiology and Clinical Pharmacology division of the Utrecht Institute for Pharmaceutical Sciences, was awarded a grant by the KNAW to study medicine to prevent rheumatoid arthritis.

The routinely collected healthcare data, also known as real-world data (RWD), in form of electronic healthcare databases, has had increasing usability in drug safety and effectiveness research. But developing novel methods for detection of potential signals for (unknown) drug effects using RWD, especially when combined with evidence from molecular and genetic studies, is truly an emerging topic.

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune musculoskeletal disease with an unknown aetiology, and an increasing incidence and prevalence worldwide. But apart from management of current disease, there is no known pharmacotherapy that can protect against the new occurrence of RA, or can hinder or stop its underlying insidious pathophysiology. Thus, my aim is to investigate pharmacotherapies approved in Europe and their potential for decreasing the occurrence of RA by proposing a stepwise algorithm of pharmacoepidemiologic studies using RWD. This algorithm includes various steps to detect, confirm, and validate the new drug signal found, using a combination of pharmacoepidemiologic and genetic epidemiologic studies, based on several data sources in our EU Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacovigilance (EU PE&PV) Research Network.

The findings of this project can have impact in several dimensions: from developing methodologies for signal detection purposes using RWD, to shedding light into the hitherto unknown aspects of RA pathophysiology, and most importantly detecting a pharmacotherapy that potentially reduces the risk of developing RA. Such drug(s) can be used in future to prevent RA in individuals at high risk of it due to genetic or environmental predispositions, or be good candidates for drug repurposing in new indications or among special population groups, contingent on eventual conduct of randomised controlled trials.