The CLUSTER Consortium, a UK wide partnership with aims of improving care of young people with JIA and its associated eye condition uveitis, recently celebrated over six years of research addressing the needs of children and young people with arthritis.
The CLUSTER Consortium recently celebrated 6+ years of successful multidisciplinary collaboration and research, in close partnership with the Patient and Parent network called the CLUSTER Champions, to address the needs of the needs of children and young people with arthritis. This Celebration Event had over 50 attendees and facilitated a dissemination of cutting-edge findings in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA) research which has made great strides to improve health outcomes. JIA causes arthritis in children and young people where this is swelling in one or more of the joints and is diagnosed before their 16th birthday, and can also lead to inflammation of the eye, called uveitis. The CLUSTER Consortium is an UK wide consortium led by Prof Lucy Wedderburn (UCL) and Prof Kimme Hyrich (University of Manchester) which has grown a community of clinicians, researchers, families, patients, industry partners and funders, working together to benefit children, young people and families living with arthritis.
The CLUSTER Celebration Event presented researcher talks focused on juvenile arthritis, uveitis, the importance of research and clinical data and future research leaders, rounding up with examples of how are continuing our partnerships in JIA research. The CLUSTER arthritis research showed that so called response to treatment is far more complex than previously thought and the child or young person’s own experience feeds into outcomes in critical ways; we showed that the child/young person’s blood cells carry information that helps to predict who will get better or not on the medication called methotrexate, and excitingly this finding was also found in a second set of patients, analysed separately. The JIA Uveitis work has led to a new test which shows some genetic differences in those destined to go on to get uveitis, which may ultimately be able to be used in clinic to decide who needs intensive eye screening. An important legacy of CLUSTER is its vast anonymised database which researchers can apply for access for ongoing analysis (details can be found here https://www.clusterconsortium.org.uk/researchers/cluster-datasets-and-data-access/ ).
Another aspect of CLUSTER success has been the nurturing and developing of future leaders in research, with 3 new up and coming world leading researchers having obtained prestigious fellowships and grants to take the work forward. The crown jewel of the research day were videos put forward from the patient and parent Champions, highlighting the successful collaboration thanks to the insight of people with lived experience. Growing partnerships from CLUSTER have shown how to successfully foster impactful research in Rheumatology and beyond.
Every step of CLUSTER’s success is thanks to its fantastic team across disciplines, with different and synergistic skills, and the engaged stakeholders from industry and public. Our research is not over and there are ongoing future plans to understand experience, disease mechanisms and outcomes in JIA. To find out more please visit https://www.clusterconsortium.org.uk/
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