Precision Medicine
Precision medicine is part of the five focus areas, including preclinical human IBD mechanisms, environmental triggers, novel technologies, and pragmatic clinical research, described in the Challenges in IBD Research document.
The overall goal of precision medicine is to tailor treatments based on specific clinical and biologic characteristics of individual patients to deliver optimal personalized care. In practice, this involves identification of biomarkers, which can be used to address the main research gaps: 1) understanding and predicting the natural history of IBD: disease susceptibility, activity, and behavior; 2) predicting disease course and treatment response; and 3) optimizing current and developing new molecular technologies.
Read more about precision medicine in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases.
Currently the Foundation is supporting precision medicine research through four research initiatives, supported by the Foundation's IBD Plexus® research database.
IBD Plexus
IBD Plexus is an unprecedented IBD research platform that centralizes and integrates IBD biosamples from thousands of patients together with their clinical and research derived data. IBD Plexus brings together clinicians as well as academic and industry scientists to maximize the use of this unique research resource to better understand IBD, discover novel drug targets, new biomarkers, and to advance the science of precision medicine in IBD and its implementation in clinical practice.
IBD Plexus Research Initiatives:
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SPARC IBD (Study of a Prospective Adult Research Cohort with IBD)
SPARC IBD is a multicentered longitudinal study of adult IBD patients, which will collect and link clinical data, patient-reported outcome data, and serial biosamples through the course of the patients' disease. Data and samples will then be used for basic, clinical, and translational research with the goal of finding predictors of response to therapy and predictors of relapse that will lead to precision medicine strategies and new therapeutic targets that will improve the quality of life of patients with IBD. -
IBD Qorus®
IBD Qorus, the Foundation’s flagship quality of care program, is designed to drive improved care and health outcomes for patients living with IBD. This first-ever adult IBD learning health system leverages the power of a collaborative improvement network. It brings together providers and patients across the United States to focus on improving how care is delivered in order to produce outcomes-driven results. -
Pediatric RISK Stratification
A study to identify the genetic, microbiological, and immunological factors in children that can be used clinical predictors (biomarkers) of complicated disease curse and response to treatment.
A RISK prediction model that integrates clinical and genetic data has been developed and we are furthering these findings to develop a test to predict disease severity at diagnosis. -
IBD Partners®
IBD Partners is a patient-powered research network and an online registry of more than 16,000 IBD patients from across the country: 15,400 adults and more than 900 kids and teens. The registry is comprised of patient-reported data captured via a series of online surveys on topics including diet, treatments, and a broad array of other issues concerning patients’ disease management and quality of life. In addition, this study also allows patients to connect their mobile health applications and wearable devices such as Fitbit®. IBD Partners also puts an emphasis on the patient voice, allowing them to generate and vote on research topics to aid researchers in generation of research questions, which they can then leverage the database to answer.