NPF-Funded Research

Project Summary:

Despite advances in treatments for psoriatic arthritis (PsA), we cannot yet predict which medication will work for an individual patient. Currently, patients must wait 3 months to see if their medication works, a time during which they may continue to experience pain and risk permanent joint damage. Our study asks a critical question: how can we shorten this wait period? To answer this question, we will use wearable activity monitors and AI to develop early, non-invasive digital markers of treatment response. This may help patients avoid unnecessary inflammation and joint damage and move them toward the right therapy faster.

How will your project help improve the lives of the 125 million affected by psoriatic disease?

Psoriatic arthritis (PsA) represents a significant burden for patients with psoriatic disease, causing chronic pain, progressive joint damage, and reduced quality of life. While effective treatments exist, identifying the right therapy for an individual patient remains a critical challenge — currently requiring a 3-month waiting period before treatment response can be assessed, during which patients may continue to suffer and risk irreversible joint damage.

Our project directly addresses this gap by developing AI-driven digital biomarkers of treatment response using wearable activity monitors and electronic health records. By identifying early predictors of therapeutic efficacy — potentially within weeks rather than months — our work aims to:

• Shorten the time to effective treatment, reducing unnecessary pain and inflammation
• Prevent irreversible joint damage by enabling faster therapeutic adjustments
• Personalize care decisions by matching individual patients to therapies most likely to work for them
• Reduce patient burden and healthcare costs associated with ineffective treatment trials
• Improve care accessibility by leveraging widely available consumer wearable technology

The digital tools that will be developed through this research are well-suited for real-world clinical deployment, meaning their benefits could extend broadly across the psoriatic disease community — including patients in settings with limited access to subspecialty rheumatologic care. Ultimately, this work advances the promise of personalized medicine for psoriatic disease, helping patients feel better faster and live fuller, healthier lives.

Why is psoriatic disease research important to you, personally? What role will this award play in your research efforts or career development?

My connection to psoriatic disease research is both personal and collaborative. As a child growing up in a small town in India, I developed a skin rash followed by intense joint pain. Whatever the underlying cause (official diagnosis was “rheumatic fever”), that experience left a lasting impression on me — the memory of debilitating joint pain and the uncertainty of not knowing what was wrong or how to get better. That experience instilled in me a deep empathy for patients living with chronic joint conditions, and a conviction that they deserve faster access to the right treatments. It is part of what drives my passion for using wearable technology to capture meaningful signals from patients' everyday lives to accelerate therapeutic decisions.

Equally important is my close collaboration with Dr. Rebecca Haberman and Dr. Jose Scher in the Department of Rheumatology at NYU Langone. Dr. Haberman, Co-PI on this grant and Associate Director of the NYU Langone Psoriatic Arthritis Center, exemplifies the kind of clinician-researcher whose dedication to patients is truly inspiring. Witnessing their tireless work in helping PsA patients — and their genuine excitement about the promise of emerging technologies like wearables — has deepened my commitment to this research area and motivated me to bring my expertise in digital precision medicine to bear on psoriatic disease.

This NPF Discovery Grant will play a pivotal role in my research program and career development. Specifically, it will enable us to generate critical proof-of-concept data establishing the feasibility and value of AI-driven digital biomarkers in PsA — data that will be essential for a future, larger-scale NIH grant submission. More broadly, this award will help shape and solidify my research program in wearables and AI for early digital biomarker discovery across a wide range of clinical conditions. Support and recognition from the NPF community at this stage of my career is both deeply meaningful and immensely motivating.

Researcher Profile:

Dr. Souptik Barua is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Precision Medicine in the Department of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Their research is centered around digital precision medicine — combining digital health tools (wearables, biosensors, and mHealth applications) with computational modeling to discover novel data-driven insights and digital biomarkers for chronic diseases. This is accomplished through novel applications of data science tools including machine learning, AI, bioinformatics, and statistics applied to digital health data.