Predictive biomarkers for treatment response in inflammatory arthritis: advancing precision medicine

Inflammatory arthritis encompasses a heterogeneous group of immune-mediated conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis, and juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Although an expanding range of conventional, biologic, and targeted synthetic therapies has transformed patient outcomes, treatment response remains highly variable. Many patients undergo prolonged trial-and-error treatment, resulting in persistent disease activity, irreversible joint damage, adverse effects, and increased healthcare costs.Predictive biomarkers offer an important opportunity to move beyond traditional treatment algorithms toward precision medicine. Clinical characteristics, circulating proteins, autoantibodies, immune-cell profiles, genetic and epigenetic markers, tissue signatures, imaging features, and digital health data may help identify which patients are most likely to respond to a specific therapy. Recent advances in single-cell and spatial technologies, multi-omics profiling, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have further enabled the discovery and integration of complex biomarker signatures.This Research Topic will bring together state-of-the-art studies investigating biomarkers that predict therapeutic response, resistance, toxicity, relapse, or sustained remission in inflammatory arthritis. We welcome research spanning biomarker discovery, analytical and clinical validation, mechanistic investigation, and implementation in clinical practice.The collection aims to clarify how molecular and cellular heterogeneity influences treatment outcomes and to identify reproducible biomarkers that can guide therapeutic selection, monitoring, and sequencing. By integrating clinical rheumatology, immunology, imaging, computational biology, and translational science, this Research Topic will highlight emerging approaches for matching the right treatment to the right patient at the right time.Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:- Genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and microbiome biomarkers- Synovial tissue, peripheral blood, and immune-cell signatures- Imaging and digital biomarkers of therapeutic response- Biomarkers predicting response to conventional, biologic, or targeted synthetic therapies- Multi-omics integration, artificial intelligence, and machine-learning models- Biomarkers of drug resistance, toxicity, relapse, and sustained remission- Prospective validation studies, clinical trials, and real-world evidence- Methodological, regulatory, and implementation challenges in biomarker-guided careOriginal Research, Reviews, Mini-Reviews, Perspectives, Brief Research Reports, Methods, and Clinical Translational Studies are welcomed. Topic editors: Elena Myasoedova, Paul Studenic, Debjeet Sur, Alessia Alunno Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/84631/predictive-biomarkers-for-treatment-response-in-inflammatory-arthritis-advancing-precision-medicine