Recruited: patients with the right degree of knee osteoarthritis

'People with early osteoarthritis rarely visit a specialist, as there’s no current treatment apart from analgesics,' says Dr Naomi Klarenbeek, Research Director Internal Medicine. CHDR needed patients with osteoarthritis in an early phase of the disease to test a novel compound which promises to protect cartilage and may even help to regenerate it. 'Recruitment was quite a challenge because the selection criteria were strict. We needed to find patients with knee osteoarthritis who still had sufficient cartilage to show a potential treatment effect.'

To speed up the recruitment process, the Recruitment department decided to run a radio advert. Soon, the investigators faced an entirely different problem: in just one week, more than 1,000 people had applied. Several hundred were selected for further investigation. Through a series of steps, including an X-ray and medical screening, 45 participants were then chosen to take part in the study. They were injected with the drug or a placebo in the knee. The effects of the experimental treatment are currently being evaluated. If CHDR wants to do another trial in osteoarthritis patients, recruitment will be easy, thanks to the large group of patients on file who have responded and can be contacted again – a nice example of CHDR’s Ready-for-Research strategy.

Klarenbeek: 'Early in the screening process, we found that the X-ray was decisive to determine who could be included. So that was done first at a private clinic nearby. The remaining participants then had to go to Maastricht in the south of the Netherlands for a special 7 Tesla MRI scan. The study participants even have to undergo this scan a few times, but they are very motivated, so that won’t be a problem. Their eagerness shows how great the need is for a drug that can stop the degeneration of cartilage in osteoarthritis.'