This webinar outlined an ongoing project to develop personalized treatment strategies for rheumatoid arthritis patients using miRNA profiling.

Millions of patients with rheumatoid arthritis are treated with TNF-α inhibiting agents, but the response rate to these therapies is low (30 percent to 40 percent) and no tool exists to predict treatment response.

During the study being discussed, Dr. Eric Schordan, Head of the Molecular Diagnostic Department at Firalis and TcLand Expression, led a project that aimed to address this via miRNA profiling in RA patients.

Using the HTG EdgeSeq platform, Dr. Schordan and colleagues first identified sets of miRNAs that discriminate responders from non-responders to anti TNF-α therapy and then developed a panel called RABIOPRED that includes more than 2,100 mRNAs identified as predictors of anti TNF-α therapy.

In a study that enrolled 67 RA patients, Dr. Schordan and his team determined that miRNA profiling using the HTG EdgeSeq platform served as a useful tool for biomarker discovery and enabled them to build predictive models for response to anti-TNF-α drugs.

During the webinar, Dr. Schordan discussed the details of that study, as well as his team's plans to validate the panel in a multicentric prospective clinical study of 600 patients.