Advancing the Journey

Gregg Silverman, MD, of NYU Langone Medical Center, explains how the Journey to Cure campaign enabled him to make a big discovery that will advance the search for a cure.

"The funding that I received from the Rheumatology Research Foundation’s Journey to Cure campaign allowed my team to develop a new tool that we hope will improve the way researchers search for a cure. 

Until now, arthritis was measured by inflammation and by symptoms. We had no way of knowing whether a treatment was fixing the immune system or just managing the symptoms. The tool developed in our Foundation-funded project allows doctors and researchers to measure the immunologic defects that actually cause rheumatoid arthritis. By measuring the number of autoimmune B cells in someone’s immunologic memory, we can now look at the underlying cause of the disease and evaluate the effectiveness of treatment.

This information provides researchers with the street signs they need to see if they are on the right track towards developing a cure. It can be applied to evaluate new, as well as existing RA medications, which can help guide the development of a cure or the treatment of individual patients. It also can be adapted to measure other diseases caused by problems with B cell autoimmune memory, such as lupus.

Being a practicing rheumatologist, I am very concerned about the welfare of my patients, and I believe we can’t be complacent. We have to keep working towards better treatments and a cure. That is what this study is all about, and that is what the Rheumatology Research Foundation is all about.”

 Journey to Cure