Rheumatoid arthritis patients often cycle through multiple expensive drugs before finding one that works for them, and the SQUEEZE consortium aims to end that trial-and-error process. The problem is that doctors currently lack reliable markers to predict which of the many available disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) will work best for a particular patient. This leads to ineffective treatments, wasted time, and high costs for both patients and healthcare systems. The consortium brings together academic centres, patients, and small businesses to develop and validate a suite of biomarkers—clinical, molecular, digital, and behavioural—that can match each patient to the drug most likely to help them. If successful, this research could transform rheumatoid arthritis care from a guessing game into a precision medicine approach. Instead of prescribing drugs and waiting months to see if they work, clinicians could use biomarker profiles to select the right drug, dose, and route from the start. This would improve treatment outcomes, reduce side effects, and lower healthcare costs by squeezing more benefit from existing medications. The project also aims to design a care model that prioritises patient preferences and needs, potentially increasing medication adherence and long-term disease control.
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The SQUEEZE consortium comprehensively addressed how biomarkers can be used to optimize disease modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a chronic immune-mediated disease with enormous health-related quality of life and socioeconomic impact. A broad choice of DMARDs with different targets is up to date available in clinical care, however without sufficient markers indicating the best choice for a particular patient, treatment strategies can be ineffective, cumbersome and expensive. The team of leading academic centres with a first-class record in translational and clinical research, together with patients and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) has set out to deliver a collaborative programme to advance the clinical application of biomarkers to improve benefit, safety, and value of approved DMARDs. SQUEEZE utilizes models from data science, clinical trials, translational science, and behavioural science to engage in a complementary, synergistic, and non-overlapping manner addressing the use of biomarkers to improve the ability to select the DMARD with the highest likelihood of fitting the immunophenotypic and clinical profile of the patient, to optimise dose and route of existing DMARDs; and to inform an innovative model of care focusing on patient ´s preferences and needs to increase adherence to prescribed drugs. Through nine dedicated work packages SQUEEZE integrates to validate clinical, laboratory, molecular, digital and behavioural biomarkers to enable the recognition of patients with high likelihood of response to treatment and the selection of the drug with highest chance of benefit for an individual patient; and as such improve efficacy and safety of existing therapies (by squeezing the most out of existing drugs) in synergy with other EU-wide activities.
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