The number of new people being diagnosed with Crohn’s and colitis is rising each year. Symptoms can be very different from one person to the next - some people will have inflammation which gets worse over time whereas in others the inflammation is easily treated. Unfortunately, we don’t know why Crohn’s and colitis starts or what controls this behaviour over time.
Our team of researchers think that studying the behaviour of human cells in the blood and gut, plus studying gut microbes (bacteria, viruses and fungi) at the time of Crohn’s and colitis diagnosis and repeatedly over the first 2 years after diagnosis may help to better understand why everyone’s experience is so different and what makes us so individual.
We hope that doing this will allow us to work out which people most need treatment early after diagnosis, and which treatment to choose. We hope this study in the future will help to make new treatments for Crohn’s and colitis and support people to make personalised choices about their care with their doctors and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) nurses.
To do this we will recruit up to 2,000 patients who may be diagnosed with IBD.
There is an urgent unmet need to understand the causes behind the onset of IBD and the different factors that contribute to inflammation.
Unfortunately, we don’t know why Crohn’s and colitis starts or what controls varying symptoms seen from one patient to the next.
We now understand that early treatment with medications known as “biologics” can be very effective at reducing flares and improving patients’ quality of life. Although these medications are highly effective, they have three major problems: they do not work for everyone, they lose effectiveness over time, and other medications that are taken later may then be less effective.
To explore these questions, our research project will recruit people with suspected IBD to investigate the microbes (bacteria, viruses and fungi) in patient’s stool, alongside analysing immune cells in their blood and gut biopsies. Samples will also be stored for future research projects that may look at additional aspects of human or microbe biology.
In the future, the findings from this study may be able to inform doctors of the best treatment for individual patients, help us to find new targets for future treatment, and importantly, reduce the disease burden on patients to improve their quality of life.