Identification of markers of responsiveness in rheumatoid arthritis patients

Despite the increasing of available drugs in RA, the overall rate of non response is 30 to 40% of treated patients. To optimize the drug prescription and better elaborate the therapeutic strategies, gene profiling in PBMCs was used to predict the responsiveness to anakinra. Thirty two patients treated by anakinra (100mg/day s.c.) and méthotrexate, were categorized as responders whenever a change of Disease Activity Score 28 > 1.2 was obtained at 3 months. Blood from treated patients was collected at baseline. In 7 responders and 7 non responders, 51 mRNAs identified by microarray were expressed as a function of the response to treatment and an unsupervised hierarchical clustering perfectly separated responders from non responders. Keywords: anakinra effect PBMC then RNA were extracted from blood samples of 7 anakinra responders, 7 anakinra non responders and 1 pool of healthy subjects used as control. Each sample was hybridized twice in different nylon membrane. The control sample was hybridized twice in each nylon membrane.