Vision

The Australian Arthritis and Autoimmune Biobank Collaborative (A3BC) exists to advance understanding, prevention and treatment of musculoskeletal and autoimmune disease by enabling high‑quality, ethical and data‑linked research at scale.
Through an integrated registry and biobank platform, A3BC brings together biological samples, clinical information, patient‑reported outcomes and health data linkage to identify disease mechanisms, treatment response and long‑term outcomes across the life course. This collaborative, multidisciplinary approach supports safer, more effective and evidence‑based diagnosis, treatment and prevention strategies.
A3BC incorporates the Australian Rheumatology Association Database (ARAD) and works in close alignment with paediatric and life‑course initiatives such as ANZ‑CLARITY and AJAR, creating a unified national research backbone for inflammatory arthritis and autoimmune disease.

Aims

A3BC aims to:

  • Establish and sustain a national registry and biobanking network
    that collects, processes and stores high‑quality biospecimens and longitudinal data for ethically approved research
  • Integrate biological, clinical and patient‑reported data
    with linked state and Commonwealth health datasets to support real‑world and life‑course research
  • Enable discovery through advanced analytics
    by supporting modern data integration, visualisation and analytical approaches across complex datasets
  • Accelerate translation into policy and practice
    by generating evidence that informs precision and preventive medicine, helping deliver the right care to the right patient at the right time

Scope

A3BC’s current focus includes major inflammatory arthritis and autoimmune conditions, including:

  • Rheumatoid arthritis (RA)
  • Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA)
  • Psoriatic arthritis (PsA)
  • Spondyloarthritis (including ankylosing spondylitis)
  • Vasculitis, including polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) and giant cell arteritis (GCA)
  • Gout

The A3BC platform also supports research in additional high‑burden and rare conditions, including:

  • Sjögren’s syndrome
  • Systemic lupus erythematosus
  • Scleroderma (systemic and localised)
  • Myositis
  • Osteoarthritis
  • Other rare immune‑mediated and inflammatory diseases

A3BC is deliberately designed as a life‑course resource, with growing inclusion of paediatric and adolescent conditions beyond JIA, such as juvenile lupus, juvenile scleroderma, juvenile dermatomyositis, juvenile vasculitis and other rare paediatric rheumatic diseases.

A national platform for impact

Built on a national network of clinicians, researchers, consumers and biobank infrastructure, A3BC provides a cost‑effective, scalable and translation‑focused research platform. By linking real‑world data with biological insight, A3BC supports a new paradigm in evidence generation to inform clinical care, guidelines, policy and future research priorities.