The number of patients living with Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis (the two main types of inflammatory bowel disease) is rising, in the UK and around the world. Treatment has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Several new medications have been developed to treat both Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Many of these are injectable medicines but new tablets have also been developed. These are often referred to as ‘advanced therapies’. All of these new medications have been carefully tested in clinical research to show they work.
However, in real life, we know that some treatments help certain people but not everyone. We want to understand what causes some treatments to be more or less effective for an individual patient. By studying this, we hope to be able to predict which medication is most likely to work for an individual patient. The idea that we might be able to select the most effective medication for an individual patient when they need it most is often referred to as ‘precision medicine’.
How are we going to achieve this?
It is likely that differences in treatment effectiveness are the result of lots of different factors. Among these, we think that gut microorganisms (bacteria, viruses and fungi) may play an important role. An individual’s genes, their immune system and lifestyle factors (for example, the foods we eat) are likely to be important too.To carry out this research, we will recruit 1325 patients with active inflammatory bowel disease (causing symptoms) from hospitals across the UK. Specifically, we will recruit patients who are about to start one of several advanced therapies already approved to treat Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis.
Watch our study summary video below
See the image of the map below for the locations of all sites recruiting to IBD-RESPONSE
IBD-RESPONSE is the largest study of its kind in the world.
So far, 1032 people have joined the study, providing a total of 2596 samples and completing 14606 questionnaires.
Click here to find out more about our published work
