Crohn’s disease: a common condition
Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that causes diarrhoea, stomach pain and weight loss as the immune system attacks the gastrointestinal tissues, leading to ulceration. Crohn’s disease affects people of all ages, but symptoms often start when patients are young, and by the time they are diagnosed, around a third of patients already have substantial damage to their bowels. Crohn’s disease is currently incurable, and although treatments exist, they do not work for everyone and almost half of all patients require surgery within 10 years of diagnosis.
INTERCEPT: betting on biomarkers
Enter INTERCEPT, a new IHI project that aims to transform Crohn’s disease from an incurable condition to one that could be managed and even potentially prevented.
Recent research has uncovered candidate biomarkers of Crohn’s disease which could be used to detect the disease in the blood years before symptoms arise. However, these biomarkers have not yet been validated.
“Biomarkers are key to future research and have the potential to revolutionise the treatment landscape for IBD,” said Awny Farajallah of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited, the industry lead for INTERCEPT.
INTERCEPT plans to verify and clinically validate a panel of biomarkers and build a blood risk score capable of identifying people with a high risk of developing Crohn’s disease within the following five years. The project will recruit 10 000 healthy first-degree relatives (e.g. children and siblings) of people with Crohn’s disease to validate the biomarkers and blood risk score.
Next, 80 people with the highest risk score will be invited to take part in an innovate trial designed to see if an established and effective medical treatment can prevent the development of full-blown Crohn’s disease.
This approach could make it easier for health care professionals to diagnose the disease early, before symptoms arise and before the digestive tract has been seriously damaged.
A collaboration that spans the globe
“For the first time, researchers from multiple European countries, North America and South Korea are working together to predict and prevent Crohn’s disease, reaching a milestone in the long path we began to walk many years ago,” said Jean-Frédéric Colombel, Director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, US.
“I am honoured to lead this unique collaboration of bright scientists from across the European continent, North America and South Korea,” said project coordinator Geert D’Haens of Stichting Amsterdam UMC (AUMC). “It really feels like this may lead to the most significant scientific progress in the field since the initial description of the disease by Burrill Crohn himself in 1932.”