Working towards personalised treatment for Crohn's Disease

What the researchers will look at?

People living with Crohn’s respond differently to different medicines. It is not easy to know which medicine will work for different people. This means people diagnosed with Crohn’s often try many medicines before finding one that works for them. This can lead to delays in getting the right treatment and managing symptoms.  

This research looks at whether there are ways to predict who will develop severe Crohn’s with lots of flare-ups.  It also looks at whether there are ways to predict response to medicines. To do this, researchers in Cambridge will use cutting-edge techniques to study blood samples from people newly diagnosed with Crohn’s, focusing on levels of hundreds of different proteins in the blood. Some of these proteins have spilled into the blood stream as a result of inflammation, for example when cells die as part of the inflammatory process.  Other proteins are produced in a carefully regulated manner to serve specific functions in the blood stream, including turning on or turning off different inflammatory cells. The patterns of these proteins might show how likely someone is to develop severe disease.  It also might show how likely they are to respond to different medicines.

What the researchers think this could this mean for people with Crohn's?

Researchers hope this study will lead to a better understanding of which medicines will work for different people and result in improved outcomes. This could mean people newly diagnosed with Crohn’s can be given medicines which will work for them from the start.  

Who is leading this research: Professor Miles Parkes, University of Cambridge
Our funding: £82,514
Duration: 24 months 
Official title of application: Towards personalised treatment in Crohn's Disease: identifying proteomic markers of disease course and treatment response.