James O'Dell, M.D., a national leader in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, recently received the 2014 Lee C. Howley Sr. Prize for Research in Arthritis. The award, bestowed by the Arthritis Foundation, recognizes team science in action that will lead to a faster cure for arthritis and related diseases.
Dr. O'Dell is chief of the UNMC division of rheumatology and immunology and chief of rheumatology at the Omaha VA Medical Center. For three decades, Dr. O’Dell has been involved in advancing treatment of rheumatoid arthritis through research.
The basis for the award is a July 2013 article Dr. O'Dell published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine entitled “Therapies for Active Rheumatoid Arthritis after Methotrexate Failure.” The study compared the effectiveness of drug therapies for rheumatoid arthritis and found that the use of a less expensive combination of disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs produced the same clinical benefits as much more expensive biological treatment.
The study has been called highly innovative in its hypothesis, design, and approach and challenged the growing trend of using biologic therapies early in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. It showed that patients who start on the conventional combination therapy do just as well as people who start on a much more expensive therapy. In addition to being less expensive, conventional medications present less severe side effects than the biologics used in the study.
"The research stands head and shoulders above the rest,” said David Wofsy, M.D., professor in residence in the University of California, San Francisco Department of Medicine. “It was a true tour de force of investigator-initiated collaborative research that provided critically important insights into one of the most important clinical challenges in the field of rheumatology."
William St. Clair, M.D., chair of the Division of Rheumatology and Immunology at Duke University Medical Center, said the paper received considerable notoriety, noting that it was cited as an important clinical advance at the 2013 Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Rheumatology “Year in Review” and listed as a major finding in the latest Annals of Internal Medicine “Update in Rheumatology.”