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New grant to Aarhus University to learn more about rheumatoid arthritis

Over the next three years, medical doctor and PhD Stinne Ravn Greisen from the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University will investigate why rheumatoid arthritis develops into a chronic disease. The research is made possible by a DKK 2.1 million postdoctoral research fellowship from the Lundbeck Foundation.

Around 50,000 Danes suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, and every year there are more than 1,300 new cases. Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease that is caused by the body's immune system mistakenly attacking healthy cells in the joints, so that these consequently become inflamed and swollen. The disease is almost always chronic, but it is not known why this is.

This is something that Stinne Ravn Greisen will, however, try to change. She conducts research into autoimmune diseases at the Department of Biomedicine, and with her new three-year postdoctoral research fellowship, she will use rheumatoid arthritis as a model for gaining a greater understanding of autoimmune diseases in general.

The hope is to be able to find some markers early in the course of the disease which can predict which patients will have suffer from the worst level of rheumatoid arthritis. In the long term, these markers may contain new opportunities for personalised treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.

Contact
MD, PhD Stinne Ravn Greisen
Aarhus University, Department of Biomedicine
Tel.: (+45) 8716 7264
Email: srg@biomed.au.dk