Crohn's & Colitis Foundation Announces New Five-Year Research Agenda

Contact: Rachel Peifer
[email protected]

NEW YORK, NY – June 3, 2024-  Today, the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation unveiled its new five-year research agenda, a strategic roadmap developed to set research priorities in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) not only for the Foundation, but for the entire IBD research community. This comprehensive plan, which involved a year-long collaborative process with nearly 100 researchers, clinicians, industry leaders, patients, and caregivers, aims to address the critical needs in IBD research and advance the understanding and treatment of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. The 2024 Challenges in IBD Research report is published in the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases journal.

The new agenda emphasizes five priority areas, human IBD mechanisms, environmental triggers, precision medicine, novel technologies, and pragmatic clinical research. These areas will focus on three main goals: preventing disease onset, remission, and restoration. By focusing on disease prevention during the pre-clinical phase and restoration of normal physiology after remission, the Foundation aims to ultimately understand what is required to stop IBD from progressing or prevent it altogether.

"Our updated research agenda is designed to challenge existing paradigms and set a new path for how we understand, treat, and ultimately prevent inflammatory bowel disease, " said Alan Moss, Chief Scientific Officer, Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. "This comprehensive plan has harnessed the collective expertise of IBD researchers and experts across the globe along with the critical input of patients and caregivers. The Foundation remains dedicated to working collaboratively with all stakeholders from across the research and patient community to achieve these goals and ultimately find cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.”

Key Highlights of the Five-Year Research Agenda:

Preclinical Human IBD Mechanisms: Understanding the biology of IBD is crucial for developing new treatments. Research in this area focuses on studying the disease at the molecular and cellular levels. The Foundation is working to develop therapies that target the root causes of IBD, rather than just alleviating symptoms.

Environmental Triggers: Environmental factors such as diet, stress, and microbial exposures are thought to play a significant role in the onset and progression of IBD. The Foundation is working to identify specific environmental triggers and understand how they interact with genetic factors to cause disease.

Precision Medicine: Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are deeply complex diseases with a range of factors influencing symptoms, disease course, and response to treatments. The Foundation is working to better understand and predict which patients will best respond to a specific treatment based on the patient’s unique clinical and biological characteristics. This will, in turn, enable researchers and clinicians to develop and deliver more effective and individualized care.

Novel Technologies: Innovative technologies, including advanced imaging, diagnostic tools, and therapeutic devices, are being developed to enhance IBD management. The Foundation will focus on adapting new technologies for non-invasive or minimally invasive IBD diagnosis, monitoring of disease activity, and personalized treatment.

Pragmatic Clinical Research: Working in collaboration with clinical teams and patients and using real-world data, the Foundation will answer questions relevant to daily clinical practice and evaluate the effectiveness of current practices in diagnostics and treatments. This has the potential to lead to standardization and optimization of the best quality of care and to improvement of clinical outcomes.

About the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation:

The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization focused on both research and patient support for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with the mission of curing Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis and improving the quality of life for the millions of Americans living with IBD. The Foundation’s work is dramatically accelerating the research process, while also providing extensive educational and support resources for patients and their families, medical professionals, and the public.