$10 million campaign launched to find a cure for arthritis
Vancouver, BC, June 1, 2004 – Advances in understanding the basic causes of arthritis are rapidly making the possibility of finding a cure for the disease a reality. With that goal, The Arthritis Society, BC and Yukon Division (TAS), launched a $10.5 million campaign today to fund two research chairs in arthritis research.
“We stand reasonably close to a cure,” says Dr. Ross Petty, head of the division of rheumatology at UBC and BC’s Children’s Hospital. “The cure is in view. It’s not there; we don’t know what it’s going to look like. But we understand so much more now about these disease mechanisms than we ever did, about how the process of arthritis actually occurs.”
The two research chairs, held at the University of British Columbia will focus on research into pediatric rheumatology and on proteomics and genomics to understand the fundamental mechanisms of the disease.
Currently, one in six people in Canada suffers from arthritis, which can strike any one, of any age, at any time. Estimates place the number of children in British Columbia who are affected by arthritis and related diseases at between 2,000 and 5,000. By focusing on how children are affected by arthritis, researchers are most likely to find the fastest route to its causes.
The research chair in pediatric rheumatology will be named the Ross Petty Chair, after the renowned rheumatologist who established at The Arthritis Society the first comprehensive program in pediatric rheumatology in Canada. It will be the first endowed chair in pediatric rheumatology in Canada, and only the second in the world. The second chair will build on the advances made in deciphering the human genome to determine how to detect disorders in the body’s gene and protein structure that would result in arthritis. When these new chairs are established, it will bring the number of research chairs focusing on arthritis in Canada to six, four of them established by TAS at the University of BC.
“The Arthritis Society has concentrated on making life better for people who have arthritis, allowing them to manage their disease as well as possible,” says Bill Langlois, TAS executive director. “But we know the moment is opportune for arthritis research to profit by new knowledge in basic science. We want to fulfill the dream of Mary Pack, the founder of The Arthritis Society more than 50 years ago, for a world without arthritis.”
According to Dr. Petty, much of the groundwork has been done in the search for a cure for arthritis. “Now the next great leap can be made. We need to dissect further the inflammatory process and understand how these rheumatic diseases actually bring about the damage they do. That’s tougher. That’s going to take a lot of work, a lot of resources. And in that sense, it’s harder. But it’s definitely do-able.”
In addition to funding the two Chairs, the campaign will establish and build three legacy endowment funds held by The Vancouver Foundation—for Care, Education and Research. These endowments funds will ensure long-term financial stability for innovative research, patient education and programs for people with arthritis.
