These biosamples will provide extremely valuable tools for clinical research in rheumatic diseases in order to identify serologic and genetic markers of disease activity as well as predictors of disease progression, response to therapy, and occurrence of adverse events. Genetic analyses will include hypothesis-driven studies on candidate genes of disease severity and response to therapy or occurrence of adverse events. These studies will be complemented by an unbiased hypothesis-generating approach using genome-wide association studies.

seantis continuously develops the backend webapplication that catalogs the collected samples.

Source: SCQM Foundation Yearly Report (http://www.scqm.ch/uber-scqm/annual- reports/annual-report-2014 [PDF])