Research Projects

Osteoarthritis (OA) is a complex joint disorder affecting over 500 million people worldwide. Current treatments only alleviate symptoms without modifying the disease, and surgeries are associated with secondary complications. To develop disease-modifying approaches, researchers have identified KAT-7, a protein that helps the survival of senescent cells in Werner syndrome, as a potential target. They hypothesized that KAT-7 might be present in OA cartilage and used a specific inhibitor (WM-3835) to downregulate senescence in the goat OA model and human OA cartilage. A HIF2alpha-specific inhibitor (PT-2385) was also identified to downregulate other OA hallmarks. The combination of inhibitors will be studied in a goat ex vivo OA model and human OA cartilage explants to demonstrate enhanced OA mitigation. Implementation of this proposal could lead to a paradigm shift in OA disease modification.