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Joint Action

Disease Modifying Osteoarthritis Agents with Christoph Ladel

Season 1, Ep. 28
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Current management approaches for osteoarthritis are usually targeted to symptoms. One way to mitigate the epidemic of osteoarthritis is to modify both its structural progression and symptomatic consequences in tandem a method known as disease modification, as distinct from symptom modification. These could potentially slow the speed of disease progression, completely halted or in an ideal world reverse the disease and regenerate the target tissue. At present, despite a number of positive trials there are no drugs that have garnered regulatory approval for this indication.


On this week's episode we discuss: what is disease modification, what have the clinical trials shown, what will the future of DMOADs look like and much more.


Christoph Ladel is working as Translational Medicine Expert. Most recent position was as team lead in the global clinical development department in Merck Healthcare KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany). In his role he was involved in design and execution of clinical studies from phase 1 to phase 3. Special responsibility was in the field of biomarker and imaging (MRI and x-ray) read-outs in clinical studies, mainly in osteoarthritis. He contributed to the respective teams to analyze data and to develop further stratification strategies based on biomarkers (incl. imaging) for studies in osteoarthritis.

 

Christoph trained as an immunologist with a PhD in immunopharmacology and immunotoxicology Dr Ladel has worked in different companies and different countries. Over the >15 years he was part of project teams or team leader in different projects for the discovery and development of therapies in osteoarthritis. Christoph is an internationally recognized scientist and has authored > 50 scientific peer reviewed publications and is co-inventor in more than 10 patents in the field of clinical strategies for osteoarthritis.


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