Anne-Marie Malfait, MD, PhD, is Professor of Medicine and the George W. Stuppy, MD, Chair of Arthritis at Rush University. Malfait received her MD degree in 1989 and her PhD in 1994, both from Ghent University in Belgium. Her early training was in rheumatology and her basic research training focused on cartilage biology. During her postdoctoral training at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in London, she was involved in the very early experiments that targeted TNFα in inflammatory arthritis. In 2001, she joined the pharmaceutical industry, as part of a team for the development of disease-modifying osteoarthritis drugs (DMOADs), with focus on chondroprotection.
In 2009, Malfait established a research group at Rush University, focused on pain in osteoarthritis. Her group studies the relationship between joint damage and the neurobiological processes that underlie pain associated with rheumatic diseases, using animal models and human tissues. Malfait has co-authored more than 100 peer reviewed papers. She is the Director of the newly established P30-funded Chicago Center for Musculoskeletal Pain (NIAMS), and co-director of a T32 that provides postdoctoral training in Joint Health. She is PI of RE-JOIN, a new NIH-funded consortium aimed at mapping the joint-nerve interactome of the knee. In the past few years, Malfait served on the Board of the Osteoarthritis Research Society International and of the Rheumatology Research Foundation, and as Chair of the Committee on Research of the American College of Rheumatology. She currently serves as faculty on the US Bone and Joint Young Investigator Initiative and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Arthritis National Research Foundation. She is strongly committed to motivating young researchers to join the efforts to study osteoarthritis and joint pain. After having served as Associate Editor for Osteoarthritis and Cartilage and for Arthritis and Rheumatology for over a decade, she started as Editor-in-Chief of Osteoarthritis and Cartilage on July 1 2022 (co-editor with David Hunter from the University of Sydney).
For more information, please see the [lab website].
