We are very excited to share that Versus Arthritis has awarded the UK’s Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centre for Children (EATC4Children) a further three years of funding from March 2021 to continue the great strides they’ve already made to help develop new and better treatments for childhood arthritis and related conditions.
What is the EATC4Children?
The EATC4Children is based in Liverpool at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Liverpool. They work in close partnership with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, Bristol and University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust.
The goals of the EATC4Children are focused on:
- improving the health and wellbeing of children and young people with arthritis and related conditions.
- identifying and testing new treatments specifically targeted at children, with a focus on therapies not yet tested in children, including early laboratory-based studies and clinical trials.
All of the work carried out in the centre is inspired by and involves children, young people affected by arthritis, and their families, and the research is always directed towards answering the priority questions they have.
What do we mean by experimental research?
Experimental medicine is an area of research that bridges the gap between basic research and clinical trials, so taking early research from the lab and into people.
This area of research allows us to get a better understanding of how the body works in healthy individuals compared to how this changes in disease. Thanks to advances in technology, we are now better able to study this in people, which will allow fascinating new insights into disease mechanisms.
The EATC4Children leads a major program of translational research, supporting one of the largest national cohorts of patients with lupus in the world with over 750 patients now recruited, identifying markers in the body that identify whether you will respond to treatments for tackling this complex disease.
How will this renewed funding make a difference?
Professor Michael Beresford, Director of the EATC4Children explains:
“The UK’s EATC4Children has been instrumental over the past six years, nationally and internationally, in tackling these major inflammatory conditions affecting children and young people.
“This renewed commitment from Versus Arthritis enables us to take forward our world-leading translational biomedical research (bench-to-bedside and back again) that helps us improve our understanding, our care and most importantly, the health and wellbeing of children and young people growing up with these life-changing disorders.”
Professor Nick Bishop, Associate Director of the EATC4Children and Professor of Paediatric Bone Disease at the University of Sheffield added:
"We are very grateful to Versus Arthritis for this continued commitment to the EATC for Children. The award will enable us to continue to support the development of vital capability and capacity in this field through our training programme work in collaboration with our partners - the Academic Paediatric Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health - as well as supporting early stage, translational and biomarker work in children with skeletal diseases such as osteoporosis, sadly a frequent accompaniment to inflammatory arthritis."