Rheumatoid arthritis. Homo sapiens

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic, inflammatory joint disease of unknown etiology and pronounced inter-patient heterogeneity. To characterize RA at the molecular level and to uncover key pathomechanisms, we performed whole-genome gene expression analyses. Synovial tissues from rheumatoid arthritis patients were compared to those from osteoarthritis patients and to normal donors. Keywords: disease state analysis Overall design: Two disease conditions (rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis) in comparison to normal donors were investigated. For the two disease groups samples derived from three individual patients and two pools of patients were hybridised.