Montana State researcher wins prestigious NIH grant to study osteoarthritis

BOZEMAN — A Montana State University researcher was recently awarded a $2.76 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to help find pre-symptom evidence of the onset of osteoarthritis, a disease that affects one in seven Americans.   

Osteoarthritis, or OA, is an often-painful disease resulting from the breakdown of joint cartilage and the underlying bone, according to Ron June, professor of mechanical engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering. A degenerative disease, OA is the fourth most common cause of disability globally and can often require joint-replacement surgery.   

“This project has the potential to lead to earlier diagnosis of osteoarthritis, which might allow patients to improve their joint pain before the disease becomes irreversible.” said Dilpreet Bajwa, head of MSU’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering. 

June said the fluid that surrounds joints, known as synovial fluid, may hold the key to early diagnosis of OA.   

“The first symptoms of osteoarthritis are pain and stiffness in the affected joints. But we think there could be molecular changes at least 10 years before the onset of symptoms,” June said. “There are a lot of signals of the disease inside a joint’s synovial fluid.”  

Also on the project are Mark Greenwood, MSU professor of mathematical sciences; Brian Bothner, director of MSU’s Mass Spectrometry Core Facility; and Don Smith, manager of the core facility. June said his lab and MSU’s Mass Spectrometry Facility have teamed up in the search for pre-symptomatic signs of the disease, which would enable affected patients to take potentially beneficial steps to reduce the severity of symptoms.   

“My lab has developed the ability to measure thousands of small molecules called metabolites in human synovial fluid, which is a thick, viscous fluid that surrounds joints,” June said. “Mark Greenwood has developed a particular method for statistical learning based on these metabolites, which helps us to identify microscopic abnormalities in the metabolites that would indicate the onset of OA.”   

June is also working with researchers at Oxford University.   

“Oxford has the largest set of clinical synovial fluid from osteoarthritic patients in the world,” he said. “They have samples of people from before they had symptoms all the way through the end stages. We have access to their samples.”  

June, who won a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation in 2016, expects those samples to help him develop metrics to identify arthritic joints as early as possible. The first stage, he said, is to profile the metabolites from more than 1,000 patients with and without OA. From that data, he will develop predictive algorithms to detect early-stage OA. 

“We will then profile the blood of a subset of those patients and hope to also develop a predictive algorithm using a simple blood sample, as opposed to needing synovial fluid, which is more invasive to the patient to obtain,” June said.   

He said he chose to focus his research interest exclusively on OA because it was an opportunity for his work to make a meaningful impact on society.   

“When I was finishing my Ph.D., I asked myself what problem is worth spending my career on,” said June, who came to MSU in 2011. “I thought with the demographic of having an aging population, and osteoarthritis being one of the world’s most widespread diseases, if I could figure out how to detect its onset earlier or to help improve care, it would be an important contribution.”  

Early detection, June said, would allow pre-symptomatic OA patients to take preventative measures to limit potential negative outcomes.   

“It has become clear that for as many as 50% of OA patients, appropriate intervention, including physical therapy and activities that promote movement such as yoga, can help prevent the need for joint replacement surgery,” he said.