Research Activities

Our Department’s research focus is on Advanced Diagnostics and Advanced Therapeutics, with the long term goal of improving clinical care and management of patients with autoimmune and rheumatological conditions.

 

The specific areas of our research focus are in 1) Arthritis, 2) Connective Tissue Diseases and 3) Health Services Research. Our Department research programmes are focused in the following areas:

 

• Osteoarthritis
  
  Identification of immunological signatures underlying an inflammatory phenotype of knee osteoarthritis with the long term goal of identifying new paradigm of treatment for knee osteoarthritis. 
  
  
• Rheumatoid Arthritis
  
  Improving the care of patients with rheumatoid arthritis by innovating management strategies, improving the knowledge of the disease, developing biomarkers for diagnosis and prognostication and identifying new potential treatment targets. 
  
  
• Spondyloarthritis
  
  Understanding the pathogenesis of spondyloarthritis to enable the development of targeted therapeutics and identifying patient-reported outcome measures to better assess the efficacy of therapeutics
  
  
• Musculoskeletal Ultrasound
  
  Studying and gaining further insight into the utility of modern imaging (e.g. musculoskeletal ultrasound) to improve patient outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis
  
  
• Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
  
  Improving outcomes for patients with systemic lupus erythematosus though identifying better biomarkers of systemic lupus erythematosus flares, personalising treatment and monitoring and improving pregnancy outcomes
  
  
• Systemic Sclerosis
  
  Identification of biomarkers for early diagnosis and discovery of novel therapies through multi-centre collaboration led by our Department