EUROPEAN RESEARCH LABORATORY FOR RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS – GENHOTEL

European research laboratory for rheumatoid arthritis - GenHotel is a research unit of University of Evry since 1999 on the Genopole campus. For nearly 20 years, our lab has focused on the aetiology of a complex disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA). After a period consisted of 'classical' genetic analyses through linkage and association studies, results, and particularly GWAS one, lead us to develop alternative approaches. Instead of considering common genomic variants, we decided to focus on rare and specific ones, to identify biomarkers in RA and its phenotypes. In this direction, we developed a global approach to the disease by mapping all the connections. Based on these approaches, our research activity is divided into two main axis: Characterization of new RA genomic variants and Computational systems biology approaches for the construction of graphical and dynamical models of disease mechanisms to study their complex dynamic behavior. Results of the first axis feed the second project, contributing to the development of a pipeline for identifying new lines in RA drug design.