A new drug has shown promise as a candidate to help prevent hand osteoarthritis, a study has found.
Researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, suspected talarozole, a drug that increases retinoic acid, could prevent the condition in disease models.
They investigated a common gene variant that had been linked to severe hand OA and using patient samples collected at the time of routine hand surgery, as well as a number of experimental models, they identified retinoic acid was especially low in ‘at risk’ individuals.
The findings are published in *Science Translational Medicine*.
Tonia Vincent, Professor of musculoskeletal biology & honorary rheumatologist at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS), said: “Hand osteoarthritis is a common and debilitating medical condition that affects mainly women, especially around the time of the menopause. We currently have no effective treatments that modify their disease”
As talarozole has an acceptable safety profile in human subjects, a small proof of concept clinical study is now under way to see if it could be a disease modifying treatment.
Dr Neha Issar-Brown, director of research and health intelligence at the charity Versus Arthritis, which funded the research, said: “There is an urgent need for disease-modifying treatments designed to prevent or reverse the painful symptoms of OA. This study reveals a new understanding of the causes of hand osteoarthritis, which could lead to identifying new biological targets for intervention in hand OA.
“This research is still at an early stage, but with these encouraging findings we are a big step closer in being able to develop a new class of disease-modifying drugs to treat osteoarthritis, prevent chronic pain, and enable people to live well with the condition.”
Variants in ALDH1A2[Q1] reveal an anti-inflammatory role for retinoic acid and a new class of disease-modifying drugs in osteoarthritis. *Science Translational Medicine* 21 December 2022
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