August 19th - RAP application deadline for the fall cycle of the CCMBM Pilot/Feasibility Grant - Awards are up to $50,000 for established investigators; and up to $40,000 for junior investigators to encourage new project ideas in musculoskeletal research, especially those that are translational in nature. Plan ahead with your application or resubmission by making an appointment for a CCMBM Specific Aims Review.
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Specific Aims Review - Increase your chances of being funded for the next RAP cycle submission and upcoming NIH R01 and K grants! Have CCMBM established investigators give you personalized feedback on your specific aims page that can help focus your aims and improve your overall application for funding opportunities. 

Review appointments are limited and only available for CCMBM members (check if you are a member) at the following locations:
1. General sign up (Mission Bay, 1700 Owens)
2. Ortho-related sign up (Parnassus, Medical Sciences)
3. Radiology-related sign up (Mission Bay, Mission Hall)

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) Cohort: Database Development for Studies of Disease Activity, Metabolic Indices and Inflammation
 
Drs. John Imboden, Dennis Black and Dolores Shoback received a CCMBM Tools and Technology grant to: (1) assess of feasibility of development of a research-ready database integrating plasma cytokine/chemokine levels with clinical data from the UCSF Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) cohort, and (2) provide statistical support for a novel analysis that will leverage this database to explore the cross sectional relationships between serum levels of 25OH vitamin D and biomarkers of inflammation in RA. The T/T award later became a UCSF RAP Pilot grant for PIs Drs. Dennis Black, Jonathan Graf, and Co-I Dr. John Imboden, to assess whether data from a cohort of RA patients, seen at the rheumatology clinics at ZSFGH and Parnassus, could be assembled into a database that could be used for addressing research questions by UCSF residents, fellows and faculty. 
 
Demographic and clinical data had been collected in a custom-built database system in several files.  In addition, unique data on subsets of patients including ACPA profiles (autoantibodies specific to RA) and VECTRA-DA (serum based panel of 12 inflammatory biomarkers used to assess RA disease activity) was available.  The Pilot project was converted into SAS format which was then merged together. In total, the cohort included more than 600 patients who were seen over 6,000 follow-up clinic visits (1 to 60 visits per patient). 
 
The SAS programs (used to convert the data) could be made available to future researchers. However, further funding is needed to make the database into a more broadly useful research resource and will require collaboration with the Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Study Design (EBSD) Core. For more information about the data, please contact Dennis Black, PhD, Director of the EBSD Core, at dblack@psg.ucsf.edu.
 
Researcher Uses the Rheumatoid Arthritis Cohort Database to Gain Insight into the Disease
 
The RA Cohort Database has been used by a prior UCSF Rheumatology Fellow, Katherine Wysham, MD (now at University of Washington) to perform an analysis that was presented in two abstracts. The first abstract describes the finding that RA disease activity as measured by DAS28ESR has a negative association with bone density, even while controlling for traditional risk factors for low bone mineral density (BMD). This project is ongoing and the data will be further explored to control for cumulative disease activity as well as other time-varying exposures to determine if the association low BMD remains. Dr. Wysham will also be evaluating repeated measures of inflammatory biomarkers to determine which are most strongly associated with BMD in this RA population. Additionally, Dr. Wysham submitted an abstract showing that the estimated fracture risk (as measured by BMD adjusted FRAX) is higher in the ACPA patients with high anti-body levels compared to the rest of the cohort despite having similar disease characteristics.