Research
The primary focus of Dr Karpouzas’ research is characterization of the atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease comorbidity and the mechanisms, biomarkers, and mitigation of accelerated coronary atherogenesis in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). The PROTECT-RA (PROspecTive Evaluation of latent Coronary aTherosclerosis in Rheumatoid Arthritis) cohort, is a matched case-control cohort of 150 RA patients without prior cardiovascular disease and age, gender, temporally and geographically matched 150 individuals without autoimmune disease, recruited within the HUCLA rheumatology and preventive cardiology clinical system. Originally established in 2010, it is still actively maintained and collecting longitudinal data during regular clinic visits. This has already characterized differences in incidence, burden and progression of atherosclerosis in RA compared with controls, the contribution of disease specific features such as autoantibodies, perturbation in lipoprotein structure and function, sex hormones, cytokines and adipokines on accelerated atherogenesis and cardiovascular risk. It defined serum and imaging predictive biomarkers of subclinical disease that further optimize clinical risk estimates and highlighted the molecular mechanisms through which newly approved biologic immunomodulatory therapies mitigate such risk.
Dr. Karpouzas is the chair of A TransAntlantic Cardiovascular Consortium of patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis (ATACC-RA) registry including >5,000 RA patients from 13 academic centers in 10 countries in EU, South Africa, and Canada, followed for development of cardiovascular disease. Further projects through ATACC-RA include the SUrvey of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factor Management in Rheumatoid Arthritis (SURF-RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus and antiphospholipid syndrome (SURF-SLE/APLS). The SURF-RA project collected and evaluated data from 15,000 RA patients from 54 centers globally, whereas the SURF-SLE/APLS collected data in over 3,500 patients world-wide.
Ongoing interinstitutional collaborations with the division of Rheumatology at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center aim at the establishment of a Los Angeles county-wide clinically phenotyped incident and prevalent rheumatoid arthritis patient consortium for the longitudinal study of synovial biopsies, proteomics, and metabolomics prior to and in response to therapy and the discovery of prognostic and predictive biomarkers.
A secondary are of research interest is health outcomes disparities in Latinos with RA. Through extensive longitudinal collection of physician and patient reported outcomes in RA at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Dr Karpouzas has identified unique predictors of self-reported functional disability in Latinos with RA and characterized the clinical implications of patient-physician discordance in disease activity evaluations on future disease outcomes, including physical function, quality of life, work productivity and activity impairment. He has further characterized the performance and clinical utility of a molecular signal response classifier detecting inadequate response to tumor necrosis factor inhibitors in Latinos with RA, including the resulting change in prescription patterns and improvement in clinical outcomes when therapies are informed by the test results.
Biography
Dr. George A Karpouzas received his MD degree, Summa cum Laude, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki School of Medicine in Greece. He completed his residency at LAC-USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, his clinical Rheumatology Fellowship at UCSD and his Lupus research fellowship at UCLA. He is currently a Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and Chief of the Division of Rheumatology at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His main research interests include atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease in rheumatoid arthritis (RA), accelerated coronary atherogenesis in RA, its biomarkers, and the role of immunomodulators on plaque anatomy and biology, the role of sex, reproductive status, endogenous sex hormones and disease characteristics on lipid metabolism in RA, patient self-reported outcome disparities in Latinos with RA, and construction of a multidisciplinary approach to patient- physician partnership in treating to target in Rheumatoid Arthritis. He conducts several biopharmaceutical clinical trials, phase I to phase IV in rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and SLE nephritis and has authored over 250 original research, peer-reviewed publications in the field of rheumatoid arthritis and SLE. Several of those have placed on top 10% of publication of all-time recorded by altmetrics.