BEST CLNICAL SCIENCE PAPER 2025 IN “CARTILAGE” WITH FOUR CHONROMETRICS AUTHORS

Heartfelt congratulations to Frank Roemer and co-authors, including four from the Chondrometrics team, for winning the “Best Clinical Science Paper Award” of articles published in „Cartilage” in 2025.

Almost at the same time, Frank was announced to win the prestigious Clinical Research Award of the Osteoarthritis Research Society (OARSI), granted at the World Congress in Florida 2026. This is a wonderful achievement that is more than well-deserved by the outstanding science Frank has conducted over the past decades, as exemplified in the paper below and in many others.

Cartilage is a leading peer-reviewed journal, publishing influential research in cartilage biology, osteoarthritis, and joint health. Are bone marrow lesions (BML), Hoffa synovitis (HS), and effusion synovitis (ES) the new “UnhappyTriad” of the joint, i.e. only the chronic and not the acute form?

As established inflammatory proxies obtained from non-contrast-enhanced (NCE) MRI, do they send a clear signal that the joint may structurally and symptomatically decline if left untreated, and that there may be a window of opportunity for “early” intervention?

Because BML, HS, and ES can fluctuate — over days or years — it has been debated how strongly these “soft” imaging biomarkers relate to “hard” endpoints, such as cartilage loss, with the latter remaining a key endpoint of disease progression and a primary DMOAD target.

Key findings of this 2-year follow up are:

• Knees with persistent BMLs, both at baseline and at year-2 follow-up, exhibit greater cartilage loss than those without
• Change in BML score in either direction is associated with stronger cartilage thinning
• Worsening HS is linked to higher rates of cartilage thickness decline
• Worsening ES (but not just presence of ES at baseline) is related to stronger loss of medical cartilage pathology

These findings come at an interesting time: Chondrometrics GmbH — which performed cartilage thickness analysis in the IMI_APPROACH and in many Osteoarthritis Initiative studies — is currently advancing AI-based, fully automated, scalable, quantitative measures of synovitis (ES and HS), and bone marrow lesions (BML), with the potential to detect subtle longitudinal changes with high sensitivity. Please see our “News” on the ESCEO and OARSI congresses 2026, to expand on that topic.

Authors of the award-winning paper: Frank W. Roemer, Mylène Jansen, Susanne Maschek, Simon Mastbergen, Anne Karien Marijnissen, Anna Wisser, Rafael Heiss, Harrie Weinans, Francisco Blanco, Francis Berenbaum, Margreet Kloppenburg, Ida Kristin Haugen, Felix Eckstein, David Hunter, Ali Guermazi, and Wolfgang Wirth

Again, congratulations to Frank to this double achievement.