PReS School - Advanced Webinar: Advancing Care in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: Personalizing Treatment and Insights from Synovial Tissue Biopsies
Date: 29.06.2026
Tuesday, 14 July 2026 | 12:00 to 13:00 CEST
Webinar topic: "Advancing Care in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: Personalizing Treatment and Insights from Synovial Tissue Biopsies"
Meet the Speakers:
Joost Swart, MD, PhD
Affiliation: Wilhelmina Children’s Hospital, University Medical Center Utrecht and University of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Presenting on: “Personalizing treatment in juvenile idiopathic arthritis: What can we actually do today?"
Bio: Joost Swart, MD, PhD is a board-certified paediatrician immunologist & rheumatologist and scientific researcher epidemiologist. He is coordinator for the European Reference Network of ERN-RITA, which brings together leading European centres with expertise in diagnosis and treatment of rare immunological disorders.
His epidemiological research focuses on comparative effectiveness and safety of drugs, treatment-strategies and eHealth in juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). He is co-PI of Pharmachild and co-P.I. of the UCAN CAN-DU project, both international projects containing the data of several thousands of JIA patients.
Adam P. Croft, MRCP, PhD
Affiliation: University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Presenting on: “What can synovial tissue biopsies tell us about juvenile idiopathic arthritis?"
Bio: Professor Adam Croft is the Arthritis UK Chair of Rheumatology and Head of Department of Inflammation and Ageing at the University of Birmingham. He currently holds a prestigious Kennedy Trust for Rheumatology Research Senior Fellowship, leads the UK Tissue Research in Childhood Inflammatory Arthritis Network and the Arthritis UK National Inflammatory Arthritis Consortium – a multicentre research network of eight universities focused on understanding the biological basis of disease remission in arthritis.
His research focuses on the underlying mechanisms of disease persistence that operate within the target tissues of immune mediated inflammatory diseases. His research team are using muti-omics and systems-based approaches to identify therapeutically tractable pathways that restore tissue health in immune mediated inflammatory diseases and employing highly selective cell depletion strategies to target specific pathogenic subsets of fibroblasts in inflamed tissue microenvironments to recalibrate the stromal tissue towards health.
Webinar moderated by:
Veronika Rypdal, MD, PhD
Chair of the JIA WP
Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital of North Norway, and UiT- The Arctic University of North Norway, Tromsø, Norway.
Silvia Maria Orsi, Phd-student
EMERGE Representative of the JIA WP
Pediatric Rheumatology Unit, Istituto Giannina Gaslini, and University of Genova, Genova, Italy.
