Figure 1.

English language publications on arthritis gene therapy in the refereed literature. The data are based on a PubMed search using 'arthritis gene therapy' as the search term. The first paper on arthritis gene therapy was published in 1992 [27]. The first efficacy data for animal models of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) appeared in 1996 [103,104], and the first efficacy data for animal models of osteoarthritis (OA) followed a year later [79]. The first human trial for RA began in 1996 [29]. Seven clinical trials for RA and OA have been initiated, one of them reaching phase II (Table 1). The first evidence of possible clinical responses to gene transfer was published this year [31]. Reprinted with permission [105].