The Oklahoma Rheumatic Disease Research Cores Center (ORDRCC) was initially funded in 2007, and subsequently successfully refunded in 2012 and 2018.  The overarching goals of the ORDRCC are to:

1. Provide an administrative, financial and technical foundation to the Oklahoma RDRCC investigators to accelerate their progress in understanding the etiology, pathogenesis and management of rheumatic disease through multidisciplinary approaches, focusing on disease mechanisms, prediction of disease development and course, prevention strategies and precision therapy.
2. Fortify and expand this nucleus through focused recruiting, junior clinical investigator development, a novel scholar program to develop early-stage investigators, educational forums and collaborative scientific interactions
3. Provide access to critical, well-phenotyped clinical rheumatic disease collections, facilitating rheumatic disease research throughout the US and world-wide.
4. Provide access to centralized cutting-edge technologies to facilitate rheumatic disease research.

The Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) Autoimmune Disease Institute in the Arthritis and Clinical Immunology Program houses the ORDRCC. OMRF was founded in 1946 as a non-profit biomedical research institute and since then has became a premier research institution with a primary focus of supporting translational research.  Currently, OMRF has over 137 scientists with M.D. and/or PhD degrees and a total of more than 470 employees. Among its scientific staff are a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Pewe Fellow in Biomedical Research and the Director of Clinical Development of the Lupus Foundation of America. OMRF ranks among the top 10 institutions in patients per investigator and has moved multiple basic discoveries into clinical practice.  The ORDRCC Center investigators prvoide a strong multidisciplinary research base.

Funding for this grant (P30AR0763750) has been made possible by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (NIAMS).