Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common form of joint disease. This presents the OA research community and pharmaceutical companies developing disease-modifying OA drugs (DMOADs) with great opportunities. The different OA subtypes complicate the traditional approaches for developing new treatments. If we can identify new markers that can distinguish different subtypes this could greatly facilitate drug development from early discovery to late clinical development. Nevertheless, the current approaches result in poorly targeted treatments and the inability to recruit the right patients for clinical trials. Thus, there is an urgent medical need for objective biomarker tools for patient phenotyping.

骨关节炎（OA）是关节疾病的最常见形式。这为OA研究社区和制药公司开发可改变疾病的OA药物（DMOAD）提供了巨大的机会。不同的OA亚型使开发新疗法的传统方法变得复杂。如果我们能够识别出可以区分不同亚型的新标志物，则可以极大地促进从早期发现到晚期临床开发的药物开发。然而，当前的方法导致靶向治疗效果差，并且无法招募合适的患者进行临床试验。因此，迫切需要用于患者表型的客观生物标志物工具。