Research targets disabling childhood illnesses

Sheffield Children’s Hospital is becoming a regional partner for the new Arthritis Research UK National Experimental Arthritis Treatment Centre for Children in Liverpool.

The centre aims to improve the health of children with arthritis by testing better and more effective drug treatments for the condition and other linked rheumatic diseases which include childhood lupus, uveitis - a potentially serious eye condition that can lead to blindness - and childhood bone disease.

Researchers in Sheffield will focus on bone disease, testing new treatments specifically targeted at children and delivering therapies effective in adults but not yet tested on children. Youngsters will be recruited in trials from across South Yorkshire.

Around 12,000 youngsters in the UK suffer from juvenile idiopathic arthritis which causes severe joint pain and stiffness and in some cases affects the internal organs. But only a handful of modern drugs used on adults have been licensed for use in young people.

Internationally-recognised bone disease specialist Prof Nick Bishop, director of the children’s clinical research facility at the hospital, said the development would help the UK push forward an area “where we are already acknowledged to be world-leading”.

The new centre will speed up the development of new treatments for children with arthritis by running small clinical trials of promising drugs that would otherwise take years to come onto the market.

Centre director Prof Michael Beresford said: “Children and young people with arthritis and related conditions have been slow to benefit fully from the rapid advances in new treatments that have appeared over the past 10 years. We have the internationally competitive expertise within the new centre to ensure that in future children will be among the first to receive new medicines that are safe and effective and will improve their health, wellbeing and quality of life throughout their lives.”