Professor Tony Culyer, Chief Scientist, Institute for Work and Health, Toronto; Professor of Economics, University of York, England

Co-editor, Journal of Health Economics.
Chair of the Office of Health Economics, London, England
Former and founding Vice-Chair of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in London, England
Former Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of York, England
Former and founding Chair, Health Economists' Study Group
Author of "The Culyer Report" on supporting R&D in the NHS (1994)

CBE (Commander of the British Empire)
Founding Fellow, Academy of Medical Sciences (London, England)
DEcon (Hon) Stockholm School of Economics
Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London (Honorary)

Tony Culyer is also an amateur church musician, organist and choir director and a member of both the Council and the Advisory Board of the Royal School of Church Music.

Debra Lappin serves as Senior Advisor to B&D Sagamore, a Washington DC based public policy firm. Ms Lappin serves as a consultant to industry, academic research institutions, non-profit entities and government on the structure and execution of collaborative cross-sector partnerships, on the development and implementation of public health initiatives, and on mechanisms for public engagement in science and enhancing public trust as an institutional asset.

Within the Department of Health and Human Services, Ms. Lappin currently serves as a member of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and as a member of the NIH PubMed Central Advisory Committee. Ms Lappin served as a charter member of the NIH Director's Council of Public Representatives from 1999 to 2003. While on the COPR, she chaired its working group on Human Research Protections, served on ad hoc advisory committees addressing NIH Oversight of Human Gene Transfer Research and Trans- NIH Pediatric Research, and provided a "public perspective" of clinical research issues in a number of national settings, including the NIH Conflicts of Interest Conference. Ms Lappin also served as a member of the Advisory Committee for the National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease.

Most recently, at the Institute of Medicine, Ms Lappin served as a member of the Committee to Examine the Organizational Structure of the NIH. She has been an invited speaker at the Institute of Medicine's public forum examining Clinical Research in the Public Interest, and worked as a member of the IOM Committee addressing Changing Health Care Systems and Rheumatic Diseases.

From 1996 to 1998, Ms Lappin was the Chair of the Arthritis Foundation. Under her leadership, the Arthritis Foundation entered in a partnership with the CDC to create the National Arthritis Action Plan, and into a collaborative alliance with the Robert Wood Johnson Family Interests to create the Alliance for Lupus Research.

Today Ms. Lappin remains active as an Emeritus Trustee of the Arthritis Foundation, lectures as an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Medicine, University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, chairs the Ethics Committee at National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, and speaks often in national settings on the subject of the new partnership between the public and the scientific enterprise.

Dr. Yelin, Professor of Medicine and Health Policy at the University of California, San Francisco is a social scientist whose research focuses on the social and economic impacts of chronic disease on individuals and society and on the impact of changes in the U.S. health care system on the well-being of persons with chronic disease. Much of his work concerns various rheumatic diseases. Dr. Yelin was among the first to document the economic burdens of rheumatoid arthritis, and to show the extent to which those burdens are related to just two items: joint replacement surgery and work loss. His research has also shown that managed care has no demonstrable adverse effects on outcomes in rheumatoid arthritis, but that rheumatologists achieve better outcomes than generalists at lower cost in treating this condition.

Dr. Yelin has won numerous awards for his research, including the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals and the Clarke Award for Outstanding Research from the Arthritis Foundation (twice). He is an elected member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Dr Hani El-Gabalawy is a Professor of Medicine, and Head of the Division of Rheumatology at the University of Manitoba. He holds an endowed Rheumatology Research Chair. His primary research interest is the pathogenesis of early synovitis, and the mechanisms sustaining synovial inflammation and proliferation. Dr El-Gabalawy's research program combines clinical observation with synovial tissue biopsy and analysis. His laboratory has expertise in the analysis of synovial tissue samples and cells using gene expression and proteomic profiling, and immunohistologic techniques.

Dr El-Gabalawy has served as a co-Chair of the Steering Committee for the Frontiers in Inflammatory Joint Diseases Conference, as co-Theme leader for the Diagnostics and Therapeutics theme of the Canadian Arthritis Network, Chair of the Canadian Council of Academic Rheumatologists, Chair of the Examinations Board in Rheumatology for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He has been a member of multiple other National and International committees in the Specialty of Rheumatology.

Dr. O'Dell is Professor of Internal Medicine, Chief of the Rheumatology and Immunology Section and Vice Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He also is Program Director for the Internal Medicine Residency Training Program at Nebraska. He received his rheumatology training at the University of Colorado.

Dr. O'Dell's main area of interest is investigator-initiated clinical research on treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. O'Dell directs the Rheumatoid Arthritis Investigational Network (RAIN), which is a consortium of 30 rheumatologists who are primarily in private practice and have as their central goal state-of-the-art studies on the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Major clinical studies completed by RAIN include multiple studies on combinations of disease-modifying drugs in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, including the first publication on triple therapy (New England Journal of Medicine, May 1996), several studies showing the effectiveness of minocycline in the treatment of early rheumatoid arthritis (Arthritis and Rheumatism, 1997, 1999, 2001), and studies showing that shared epitopes can predict response to disease-modifying therapy.

Dr. O'Dell is an NIH-funded investigator with his current grant looking at predictors of response in the treatment of patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Dr. O'Dell has served on many American College of Rheumatology (ACR) committees including Research; Communications and Marketing; CORC; and, most recently, on the Research and Education Foundation. Dr. O'Dell is currently Vice-President and President Elect of the ACR Research and Education Foundation.

Dr Hyrich is currently an Arthritis Society of Canada Research Fellow. Born in Winnipeg, she obtained both her Bachelor of Science (1992) and Medical Degree (1996) from The University of Manitoba. She completed her Internship and Internal Medicine residency at the University of Manitoba in 1999. Subsequently, she moved to Ontario and completed her Fellowship in Rheumatology at the University of Toronto in 2001. In 2001, Dr Hyrich was awarded a 3-year Arthritis Society Research Fellowship and commenced a PhD in Epidemiology and Health Sciences at the Arthritis Research Campaign Epidemiology Unit at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Professors Alan Silman and Deborah Symmons. Her thesis is entitled "Assessing the Safety of New Medicines - Impact of Study Design: The Experience of Anti-TNFa Therapy in Rheumatoid Arthritis". She is currently working with the large British Society for Rheumatology Biologics Register, which is prospectively collecting information on all patients receiving biologic therapy for a rheumatic disease throughout Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Dr Jacques Le Lorier was born in Mexico where he got his medical degree at the University of Mexico. He spent 7 years in Minnesota where he obtained a PhD in Pharmacology and Biostatistics and completed a residency in internal medicine. He then moved to Montreal where he became assistant director of the clinical pharmacology department at Ayerst Laboratories. In 1974, he became member of the pharmacology department of the faculty of medicine of the University of Montreal and of the department of medicine of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal hospital. He founded the medical obstetrics department at Sainte-Justine hospital and the service of Clinical Pharmacology at the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal hospital. From 1985 to 1991, he chaired the departments of medicine of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal hospital and of the faculty of medicine of the University of Montreal. In 1979, he became member, and from 1987 to 1996, President of the Advisory Council on Drugs of the Ministry of Health of the Quebec government. Since January 1993, he is the head of the Pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacoeconomy Research Unit at the Research centre of the Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal Hospital. Since 1996, he directs the clinical pharmacology program at the University of Montreal. He is a member of the Honorary Editorial Board of Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, Disease Management & Health Outcomes and Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. In 1998 he became director, and for the year 2001 President of the International Society of Pharmaco-Epidemiology. His main research interests are pharmacoepidemiology and pharmaco-economics.

Linda Li is a CIHR-funded Post-doctoral Fellow in the Clinical Epidemiology Program, Ottawa Health Research Institute. She completed her Ph.D. degree in Clinical Epidemiology at the Department of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation, University of Toronto. Dr. Li is also a physiotherapist at The Arthritis Society, Ontario Division, and a Clinical Lecturer at the Department of Physical Therapy, University of Toronto. Her current research activities include evaluation of rehabilitation services models for the management of rheumatoid arthritis and the use of non-pharmacological treatment among people with arthritis, and economic evaluation. Her post-doctoral training focus on the influence of organizational structure and behaviours on the implementation of best practice information in clinical settings.

Scientific Director, National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases.

Dr. Lipsky was a Professor of Internal Medicine and Microbiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and the Harold C. Simmons Professor of Arthritis Research and the Director of the Simmons Arthritis Research Center until assuming his current position in October 1999. He was previously on the Board of Directors of the American College of Rheumatology and President of the Clinical Immunology Society. He is the previous Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Immunology, a past President of the Clinical Immunology Society, and a member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians. Dr. Lipsky is an author of more than 500 scholarly publications.

Dr. Lipsky received his AB degree at Cornell University and his MD degree at New York University School of Medicine. He subsequently was a resident in Internal Medicine at the University of Rochester/Strong Memorial Hospital and completed fellowship training at the NIH. He is Board certified in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology.

Dr. Inman completed his undergraduate degree at Yale University, and his medical degree at McMaster University. He did his training in Internal Medicine at Vanderbilt University and his fellowship in Rheumatology at Cornell University, based at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. He worked as a research fellow at the Hammersmith Hospital in London before returning to a faculty position as Assistant Professor of Medicine at Cornell University. He then moved to the University of Toronto where he was appointed Associate Professor and subsequently Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Immunology, and attending physician at Toronto Western Hospital.

On the international scene, he has held numerous leadership positions within the American College of Rheumatology, including President of the Northeast Region of the ACR, member of the Board of Directors of the ACR, and Chair of the Abstract Selection Committee of the ACR annual scientific meeting. He was Vice-President of the XXI PanAmerican Congress of Rheumatology, co-chair of the NIH conference on HLA-B27, and Chair of the Workshop on Experimental Autoimmune Diseases at the 11th International Congress of Immunology in Stockholm. He is Past-chair of the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board of the Spondylitis Association of America. He is co-PI on the NIH-funded North American Spondylitis Consortium, a multicenter study on the genetics of ankylosing spondylitis. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the International Ankylosing Spondylitis Genetics Consortium. He has been Visiting Professor of Rheumatology at numerous universities in the U.S. and Europe. He is a regular invited lecturer in the "Advances in Rheumatology" courses held at Harvard Medical School and New York University. He is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Rheumatology and is a Section Editor of Current Opinion in Rheumatology.

On the national scene he has been Visiting Professor at many Canadian universities, and was selected to deliver the Dunlop-Dottridge Lecture at the annual meeting of the Canadian Rheumatology Association meeting in Montreal. He has received awards for the Woodbury Lectureship at Dalhousie University, the Ogryzlo Lectureship at the University of Manitoba, and the Little Lectureship at the University of Toronto. He has received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the Canadian Rheumatology Association. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Spondyloarthritis Research Consortium of Canada. He is co-Director of Frontiers in Inflammatory Joint Disease, a national research consensus conference.

He is Vice-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Arthritis Society Ontario Division. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Arthritis and Autoimmunity Research Center Foundation.

Locally, he is a member of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, with appointments as Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Immunology and in the Institute of Medical Sciences. He was Director of the University of Toronto Division of Rheumatology 1991-2003. He is Director of the Arthritis Center of Excellence at The University Health Network, a multidisciplinary research program incorporating basic and clinical investigators.

Paul P. Tak, M.D., Ph.D. - Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Clinical Immunology and Rheumatology at the Academic Medical Center/University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Dr. Tak has specialized in using the analysis of synovial biopsies to identify new targets for therapies and using synovial tissue samples for the evaluation of molecular effects of targeted therapies. His group has huge experience in the molecular analysis of biopsy samples as well as experience in cell biology and animal models of arthritis. His Division has a completely integrated structure of the clinic with basic science. Dr. Tak has published over 100 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is presently the Principle Investigator for several targeted therapy programs in autoimmune disease, especially in rheumatoid arthritis and psoriatic arthritis. In addition, he has a strong interest in gene therapy and research on signal transduction pathways.

Professor Farewell's area of expertise is the development of statistical methodology for the analysis of medical data. He has been involved with research in rheumatology for the last 15 years, working closely with investigators in Canada and the UK as well as the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics international group of rheumatologists.

Professor Farewell is involved in clinical trials in rheumatology, serving on the steering groups of ongoing trials and on the national Data Monitoring Committee for Arthritis Research Campaign trials in the UK. He has also published a large number of papers, primarily with Dr. D.D. Gladman, based on the clinical database in psoriatic arthritis maintained at the University of Toronto. A particular aspect of this work is to develop models for the longitudinal follow-up of patients with psoriatic arthritis.

Wim B van den Berg was born in Amsterdam, studied Biochemistry at the free University in Amsterdam and made his doctoral thesis in Pathobiology at this University. At present he is a professor of experimental Rheumatology and the Director of the Rheumatology Research Laboratory and advanced therapeutics at the University Medical Center in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

His research focuses on mechanisms of inflammation as well as cartilage and bone destruction in arthritis and osteoarthritis. Special attention is given to the role of cytokines and growth factors and the use of transgenic animal models in the mouse. The group has long term experience in translating findings from animal models to understanding of processes in RA and OA patients and the use of animals to identify and validate novel therapeutic targets. Recent approaches include functional genomics, and application of viral gene therapy and tissue engineering. He published over 350 international papers and is a member of the editorial board of many international Journals.

He received the OARSI basic science research award in 2001 and the Dutch Federa award in 2002. Professor van den Berg is a past general secretary of the Osteoarthritis Research Society International (OARSI) and current president of the International Association of Inflammation Societies (IAIS).

Diane Lacaille is an assistant professor in the Division of Rheumatology at the University of British Columbia, and a research scientist at the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada, in Vancouver. She completed medical school and internal medicine training at Mc Gill University in Montreal, and her Rheumatology training and a Master's in Health Sciences, clinical epidemiology track, at the University of British Columbia.
Her research focuses on two areas:

1. Studying the impact of arthritis on employment and preventing work disability. Employment is an aspect of function that has received little study and is poorly addressed by current arthritis health care services. Her work has evaluated the magnitude of work loss from arthritis, using data from a national health survey; and identified modifiable work-related risk factors for work disability (WD) for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Building on this research, she is developing and pilot testing a multidisciplinary program to help people with inflammatory forms of arthritis remain employed. She has also assessed the outcome of self-employment (SE), as an alternative employment option for people with arthritis, and identified the predictors of successful SE.
2. Evaluating the quality of health care services received by people with RA, using a population-based cohort of RA for the province of BC. This work indicates that current clinical guidelines for RA are not applied at the population level. A large proportion of the RA population is not receiving treatment with DMARDs (disease modifying agents), which are considered essential for RA, and is not followed by rheumatologists.

Dr. Klippel has authored numerous scientific and clinical publications, and is a frequent presenter at conferences and meetings worldwide. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several medical journals, and is a Visiting Professor of Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. He is a diplomat of the American Board of Internal Medicine, board-certified in rheumatology, and a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the American College of Rheumatology.

His honors and awards include the Surgeon General's Exemplary Service Award, Distinguished Clinical Teacher Award (NIH Clinical Center), Directors Award (NIH Clinical Center) and the Burroughs-Wellcome Visiting Professor Award from the Royal Society of Medicine in London.

Dr. Klippel received a bachelor's degree from Bowling Green State University and a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Yale-New Haven Hospital and his fellowship in rheumatology at the University of California at San Diego.

Dr. Brian Feldman is an Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Population Health Sciences and Health Policy, Management and Evaluation at the University of Toronto, where he has taught both Critical Appraisal and Introduction to Clinical Epidemiology courses for the past 10 years. He is a full-time staff rheumatologist at the Hospital for Sick Children, where he specializes in treating children with Juvenile Dermatomyositis, and is Chief of the Arthritis Team at the Bloorview MacMillan Children's Centre. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair, awarded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Prior to this, Dr. Feldman was an Ontario Ministry of Health Career Scientist. He has numerous publications to his credit, as well as holding many research grants. His areas of interest include the development of methods for the study of rare disease, and practical clinical trials in pediatric joint disease. He belongs to a number of prestigious national and international rheumatic disease organizations, including the Canadian Arthritis Network, the Childhood Arthritis and Rheumatology Research Alliance, the International Hemophilia Prophylaxis Study Group, the Pediatric Rheumatology International Trials Organization and the International Myositis Assessment Collaborative Study group.

Dr. Dafna Gladman is Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto. She trained in both Internal Medicine and Rheumatology at the University of Toronto and did further post-graduate training in HLA Typing at the Tissue Typing Laboratory, UCLA. Dr. Gladman has been Senior Staff Physician at the Toronto Western Hospital since 1995. Dr. Gladman is Deputy Director of the Centre for Prognosis Studies in The Rheumatic Diseases, Toronto Western Hospital, University Health Network, the Director of the Psoriatic Arthritis Program, and Co-director of the University of Toronto Lupus Clinic. She is a Senior Scientist at the Toronto Western Research Institute, Division of Outcomes and Population Health. She is the director of the HLA Laboratory of the Centre for Prognosis Studies in the Rheumatic Diseases.

Dr. Gladman's research program includes clinical and laboratory research. The clinical research program began with the establishment of the psoriatic arthritis clinic in 1978 is the largest psoriatic arthritis longitudinal observation cohort in the world. From this cohort, clinical features, assessment tools, outcome measures and prognosis have been described. The observations have changed the approach to patients with psoriatic arthritis. Recently Dr. Gladman established an international Group for the Research and Assessment of Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis (GRAPPA). This group is developing classification criteria, assessment instruments and treatment guidelines for psoriatic arthritis.

Dr. Gladman joined the lupus program in 1976 and with Dr. Urowitz has studied systemic lupus erythematosus describing new clinical features, developing measurement tools, describing the outcome and prognostic factors for this disease. In 1987 Dr. Gladman established the Systemic Lupus International Collaborating Clinics (SLICC) group and chaired it for 10 years. Under Dr. Gladman's guidance the SLICC group developed a damage index for lupus, validated activity measures which have allowed for the standardized assessment of SLE.

The laboratory research program involves genetic studies in the rheumatic diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus, scleroderma and vasculitis). Initially this research involved HLA markers and more recently other genes. These studies have resulted in the recent discovery of a new gene associated with psoriatic arthritis.

Dr. Gladman has published 229 peer-reviewed papers and 287 abstracts and has contributed chapters to 84 books.

Dr. MacLeod is currently the Executive Director, British Columbia Research Institute for Children's and Women's Health, Vice President (Academic Development), BC Provincial Health Services Authority, and Assistant Dean (Research) and Professor of Pediatrics, Faculty of Medicine, University of British Columbia. Dr. MacLeod spent 14 years at the University of Toronto (pharmacology, clinical biochemistry, pharmacy, medicine and pediatrics), and has held hospital appointments at the Toronto Hospital, the Hospital for Sick Children, the Addiction Research Foundation and two general hospitals in Hamilton. He completed a five-year term as Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University in 1992 and was the founding director of the Father Sean O'Sullivan Research Centre at St. Joseph's Healthcare, Hamilton until June 2002. His main research interests are in human and clinical pharmacology, adverse drug reactions, drug policy, and optimal drug use for children, as well as international health and medical education. He has authored more than 210 medical papers, text chapters and books. Dr MacLeod is also Vice President, Medical Affairs, at Innovus Research Inc, a contract research organization.

Andreas Maetzel is Scientist in the Division for Clinical Decision Making at the Research Institute of the University Health Network. His main areas of research are decision analysis models and health economic research applied to musculoskeletal disorders. Other research relates to the pharmacoeconomics of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, gastroprotective agents and medications to prevent and treat non insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. Dr. Maetzel went to medical school in Bonn, Germany and Paris, France where he completed his Dr. of Medicine degree in partnership with the University Medical School of Hannover. Dr. Maetzel received training in rheumatology at the Cochin Hospital, University Rene Descartes in Paris. Training in Clinical Epidemiology followed with completion of an MSc and a PhD degree in the Clinical Epidemiology Program at the University of Toronto.

Boulos Haraoui, MD FRCPC is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the Université de Montréal and head of the Clinical Research Unit in Rheumatology at the Centre Hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal (CHUM, Hôpital Notre-Dame).

Dr Haraoui received his medical degree from St. Joseph University in Beirut, Lebanon. Following his post graduate training in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology at the University of Montreal, he completed a research Fellowship at the Arthritis Branch of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He is on staff in the department of Rheumatology at Hôpital Notre-Dame du CHUM since 1984.

Doctor Haraoui is the Past-Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Canadian Rheumatology Association and past-member of the Executive of the CRA. He is currently member of its Therapeutics Committee.

He is a founding member and the vice-chairman of the Canadian Rheumatology Research Consortium. He is also the President of the Laurentian Conference of Rheumatology.

He served on the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada examination board for rheumatology and is a past member of the Subspecialty Nucleus Committee on Rheumatology of the RCPSC.

Doctor Haraoui also sits on several provincial, national and international educational and advisory committees, specially on issues pertaining to the diagnosis and management of rheumatoid arthritis.