White House Highlights Innovative Arthritis Research - PR Newswire - The Sacramento Bee

"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will highlight innovative arthritis research at an event today honoring 'Open Science Champions of Change.' Dr. Stephen Friend, president of Sage Bionetworks, will be recognized at the event for innovative research projects such as the Rheumatoid Arthritis Responder Challenge, a collaborative genomics study that will use open scientific data and publications to accelerate progress in rheumatoid arthritis, sponsored in part by the Arthritis Foundation. Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects 1.5 million Americans and can lead to long-term joint damage. Currently, up to one-third of rheumatoid arthritis patients do not respond to rheumatoid arthritis treatment after a standard course of therapy and there are no existing genetic predictors to identify who will and will not respond to a particular therapy. 'Innovative research collaborations such as the Rheumatoid Arthritis Responder Challenge will help predict the best therapy as we work toward a goal of personalized medicine for rheumatoid arthritis,' said Arthritis Foundation Vice President of Research, John Vernachio, Ph.D. 'We are excited about gaining genetic insight from the Challenge and applying those findings to citizen scientists enrolled in an existing  Arthritis Internet Registry.' Expediting Treatments Through Challenges ... Challenges have been used successfully in other research fields, and for the past six years the DREAM project has organized a series of Challenges in systems biology intended to advance the field by organizing multiple groups to attack the same problems from different angles. Earlier this year, DREAM and Sage Bionetworks merged their efforts to work on future DREAM Challenges together and take them to a new level of operation and impact ..."