BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

SDC4: OA joint effort

September 3, 2009 7:00 AM UTC

Most approved osteoarthritis therapies are NSAIDs that treat the symptoms but do not halt the progress of the disease. Indeed, joint replacement surgery is the only curative strategy. Now, a team of German and South Korean researchers has shown that inhibiting syndecan-4 prevents cartilage damage in mice.1 The findings point to a strategy for halting-if not reversing-disease progression.

Disease modifiers would be especially welcome in OA because the disease is difficult to detect until damage has occurred. The search for targets involved in the pathogenesis of OA thus far has yielded little fruit, in part because the disease has multiple genetic components that are not well understood...