Karolinska Institutet, LUMC coordinate largest European program on RA

Mar 9 2011

Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands will coordinate the largest European program so far, aimed at developing new therapies against Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). The program, named Be The Cure (BTCure), is funded for the next 5 years by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), and will bring together academic rheumatology research and research in pharmaceutical companies in Europe.

The IMI is a public-private partnership between the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA). The aim of the BTCure program is to combine academic and industrial resources in order to enhance both basic understanding of disease processes and therapeutic development, in particular in the area of personalised medicine. The program has a total budget of 38 million Euros, and includes 34 partners from all over Europe.

"BTCure will develop new diagnostic methods to discover the early forms of RA as well as tools to separate the different forms of RA, where different molecular mechanisms are involved and where different therapies may be required", says Lars Klareskog, Professor at Karolinska Institutet and the Managing Coordinator of this new IMI initiative.