Genetic studies of complex diseases could reveal new drugs

More than 40 new genetic regions have been linked with rheumatoid arthritis, some linked with the targets of existing drugs. Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), an autoimmune disease, is one of the most common forms of arthritis, causing painful inflammation of the joints. Now an international collaboration has published findings from a massive genetic study of the disease in the journal Nature.  The researchers performed a meta-analysis of multiple individual genome-wide association studies (GWAS), collectively representing data from just under 30,000 RA patients and over 70,000 controls, all of European or Asian ancestry. This involved examination of around 10 million genetic variants, and resulted in the identification of 42 new genetic