Using detailed biological analyses of patients with inflammatory bowel disease to help develop personalised medicine approaches
Lead Researcher: Dr Aamir Saifuddin
Supported by the Digestive Diseases Theme
We have been recruiting patients who are having flares of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and those with inactive disease and healthy (non-IBD) controls for comparison. We have been collecting a range of samples, including biopsy samples from the lining of their large bowel, blood samples and stool samples, which we are in the process of analysing. This will provide detailed information about the ‘pattern of inflammation’ in individual patients. Our previous research suggests that patients with IBD do not all have the same patterns of inflammation – that is, the inflammatory chemicals that cause inflammation and symptoms actually differ in different people, even though all patients ultimately suffer from similar symptoms of bleeding, diarrhoea and pain. Our results are not yet available because the BRC funding award allowed us to significantly broaden the scope of our research and the number of patients we could practically recruit. We are now collecting a larger range of samples from patients, including follow-up samples, and we have a higher target.
We have recently sent the first batch of samples for analysis. We should then be able to profile individual patients’ stool microbiome and their inflammatory chemicals in lots of detail, and link these findings together using specialist computational techniques. This will help us to understand the biology of IBD in lots of detail. From this, we will be able to consider new chemical targets for novel future IBD drugs. We will also be able to test some of our previous findings, so we can see if we can predict which drugs are most likely to work in individual patients, which would be a huge leap forward in IBD care.