Kenneth G. Saag, MD, professor of medicine and epidemiology, and director of the Center for Education and Research on Therapeutics of Musculoskeletal Disorders at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has served as the ACR representative since OMERACT 6. “It has now broadened to take on more structure and a growing relationship with other, longer-standing international bodies, such as the ACR and EULAR,” he says.
Dr. Saag is especially interested in watching the passion that worldwide experts bring to the OMERACT process. He points to a joint ACR/EULAR project to develop measures for gout response criteria that was seeded by the OMERACT process.
“Another huge benefit of OMERACT is that it has been a tremendous training vehicle for our junior faculty and fellows,” he says. “Junior clinical investigators can spend one-on-one time with experienced, senior-level people from throughout the world.”
Tensions and Image Issues
Inclusion of industry representatives has been a contentious issue, but OMERACT’s organizers have always strongly believed that true consensus about outcomes measures is possible only if all stakeholders are brought to the table. Dr. Saag believes inclusion of industry representatives enlivens the OMERACT process. “Therapeutic development is inherently a public-private partnership,” he says. “Having all partners at the table when we are designing measurement sets that are to be used in clinical trials leads to a richer and more relevant discussion.”
Dr. Boers suspects that some in the rheumatology community harbor an unspoken belief that “OMERACT is, in some way, an industry vehicle. We obviously feel that is not true. All you can do, of course, is just keep up the good and keep on showing that the results that come out of OMERACT are not industry results, but are scientific results.” As an example, Dr. Strand points to the successes of the newer disease-modifying antirheumatic drug trials in RA as a direct result of OMERACT’s efforts, acting with the ACR and EULAR in establishing consensus regarding outcomes measures.
Current Challenges
Executive committee members are aware that success could spoil the OMERACT process. Limiting the number of people at the meetings continues to be a challenge. OMERACT has “grown tremendously, and we’re now trying to figure out how to try to limit the number of topics at each meeting,” says Dr. Strand. The stepped plan (SIG to workshop to module) for consideration of meeting topics was one answer to the challenges of growth. After OMERACT 8, held in Malta, many attendees complained about the number of topics and the expanding meeting size.
