Inflammatory arthritis (IA) are chronic, a progressive autoimmune disease that, if left untreated, can lead to loss of function of the joint and detrimental effects on the patient’s quality of life. Notably, most IA patients fail to achieve long-lasting remission based on currently available therapeutic options. The aforementioned effect reflects the complex cell-cell interactions and underlying immunological pathways that influence disease pathogenesis in IA. The increased availability of synovial tissue biopsies and the recent implementation of high dimensionality mass cytometry, single-cell RNAseq analysis, and high throughput immunofluorescence approaches has significantly improved our understanding of synovial inflammation. However, new challenges have arisen regarding the standardization of handling and processing of synovial tissue samples and data exploration, visualization, and analysis approaches. Notably, the development of a novel in vitro assay to validate bioinformatically identified pathways involved in synovial inflammation is lacking.

This methods collection aims to coalesce recent innovations in techniques and methodological approaches used in the study of the inflamed joint, assess the potential impact of tissue handling on experimental outcomes, and ultimately explore the development of much needed in vitro confirmatory studies of computationally derived data.