Protagen AG, a company concerned with the development of advanced diagnostic tools to address some of the most severe autoimmune diseases, has today announced that it will join the MATURA Consortium.

The overarching mission of the MATURA Consortium is to improve patient care in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) by rationalizing therapy decisions through a stratified medicine approach.

MATURA (MAximising Therapeutic Utility for Rheumatoid Arthritis) aims to identify treatment response predictors which will allow the allocation of patients to subgroups defined by the therapy they are most likely to respond to, early in the disease process. RA provides the ideal setting for the introduction of a stratified medicine approach as the treatment is standardized, there is a significant non-responder rate to each marketed and commonly used drug, and early and effective therapy has consistently been shown to improve long-term outcomes, including joint damage, disability and employment.

Professor Costantino Pitzalis from Queen Mary University of London, who leads the Consortium, said: “We are delighted that Protagen has joined our Consortium. There are currently a number of biologic treatments in RA and at the moment, we have no way of predicting favorable patient drug response before therapy selection and treatment”. Professor Anne Barton from the University of Manchester, who co-leads the consortium, explained: “Being able to accurately predict whether a treatment will work or not, would lead to more targeted and individual treatments as well as greater efficacy and better quality of life for patients. Protagen and its unique, proprietary SeroTag^® platform is a new key asset to our group of established industry partners, and significantly support our quest for Treatment Response Predictors”.

Stefan Müllner, Protagen CEO, adds, “Our innovative SeroTag^® technology allows for the first time the systematic determination of response prediction markers to select the most appropriate drug and therapy for Rheumatoid Arthritis. In addition, it enables new approaches for successful drug development, and to support patients, rheumatologists, payers and the pharma industry in our combined effort to improve patient management by rationalizing treatment decision. This is exactly what MATURA is aiming for and we feel privileged to be part of the Consortium and support these efforts.”

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