Monitoring the intestinal immune system in IBD

What is immune monitoring?

We have a system for examining the intestine’s immune system before, during, and after treatment. This allows us to understand how medications affect Crohn's and Colitis and may help to predict response or relapse. It also helps us understand the disease better in order to develop new treatments and treatment strategies.

Why do we need intestine biopsies to do this?

The immune system in the intestine is specially adapted to help the intestine function. We can look at blood, however to fully understand Crohn's and Colitis you need to understand what is happening in the wall of the intestine.

How do we want to develop this?

We are already using this technique in a study to understand how the immune system behaves when we change medication in patients with Ulcerative Colitis. In order to understand how the intestine works when it goes wrong, we want to understand it when there is no disease.

Our aim is to recruit patients who are on medications like adalimumab (anti-TNF) for other reasons (such as psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis). This will help us learn what TNF actually does in the healthy intestine and what the consequences of blocking it are. This will help us to better understand health and IBD and move towards targeting our treatments more accurately and developing new ones.

For further information, please contact robin.dart@crick.ac.uk 

Funded by Guts UK