A key focus of Professor Fisher's current work is on clinical trials in inflammatory disease, especially Sjögren’s syndrome. Sjögren’s syndrome is an autoimmune condition resulting in dryness of the eyes and mouth, alongside a range of other complications that occur in a proportion of patients. Currently there are no existing disease-modifying therapies. However Ben's team have an active clinical trials programme and he presented data from a commercially sponsored trial of a novel agent blocking CD40 at the American College of Rheumatology annual congress in 2017. This was the first trial, to their knowledge, to show positive effects prospectively on a validated measure of systemic activity in a double-blind randomised controlled trial. Professor Fisher is chief investigator for the Optimising Assessments in Sjögren’s Syndrome (OASIS) cohort that has a number of objectives including to identify biomarkers of disease activity from blood, saliva and tissue, that may help inform future clinical trial design. He is a deputy clinical director at the Cancer Research UK clinical trials unit Birmingham, leading the Inflammation and Advanced Cellular Therapies (I-ACT) team.
Ben also has a longstanding interest in risk factors for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and Sjögren’s syndrome, including autoantibodies and diet.
Lay summary
Sjögren’s syndrome is a disease where the body’s immune system causes inflammation in the glands that produce tears and saliva causing dryness. It is associated with profound fatigue in a large number of patients and together, these symptoms cause a large reduction in health-related quality of life. In a proportion of patients the disease also affects other body systems such as the joints and the lungs. There are no therapies proven to modify the underlying immune disease, but they have an active programme to study new drugs from industrial partners, including those blocking CD40 which in an early trial has shown some promise. CD40 has a role in how cells of the immune system activate each other. Professor Fisher also has an interest in how to measure how active a patient’s disease is, and to understand risk factors for disease such as diet; i.e. what makes a person more likely to develop Sjögren’s syndrome or rheumatoid arthritis, when others do not.