New genetic discoveries offer hope to IBD patients
Dr. Mark Silverberg, an
Investigator with Mount Sinai’s Samuel Lunenfeld Research
Institute, has co-authored this study with colleagues in Europe and
the United States. Published in the November 2012 issue of the leading
journal Nature, the study reveals new information that there is a vast
amount of genetic overlap between Crohn’s disease and Ulcerative
colitis (the two most common subtypes of IBD), suggesting that they
share common biological pathways. IBD patients require lifelong treatment with drug therapy, and often need surgery to repair the damage the disease causes. The biological pathways of IBD, as uncovered in this study, will ultimately have an impact on management, because of the opportunity to ‘personalize’ the approach to individual patients. With more genetic markers uncovered for IBD, personalized medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital will help determine an individual’s predisposition to IBD and allows physicians to prescribe individualized and efficient treatments based on each patient’s genetic profiles. IBD is a group of inflammatory conditions of the colon and small intestine. It is not yet known what causes this disease; it is currently thought that environmental factors seem to trigger the body’s immune system to produce an inflammatory reaction in the intestinal tract that continues without control in someone with an inherited predisposition. As a result of the inflammatory reaction, the intestinal wall is damaged, leading to diarrhea and abdominal pain. In this study, researchers found that many of the IBD-related genes are involved in the body’s first line of defence against infection. This illustrates that a poorly regulated immune response seems to be a major factor in IBD: when a bacterium is detected, these cells are not just activated, but become overactive. The team also found that 70 per cent of the genetic regions associated with IBD are shared with other complex diseases, especially those also driven by abnormal inflammation, such as psoriasis and ankylosing spondylitis. They also observed a strong overlap between the IBD genes and those underlying susceptibility to mycobacterial infections such as leprosy and tuberculosis, again highlighting the relationship between IBD risk and our immune response to bacteria. As both a gastroenterologist and a scientist, Dr. Silverberg’s work spans both research activities within the Lunenfeld and patient care within Mount Sinai’s Centre for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) which is an international leader in delivering excellence in clinical care, education and research for patients with disorders of the gastrointestinal tract (esophagus, stomach, pancreas, liver, small intestine and colon), and in particular, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD. Dr. Silverberg’s work is supported by the National Institutes of
Health (NIH), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Crohn’s
and Colitis Foundation of Canada (CCFC) and Crohn’s and Colitis
Foundation of America (CCFA). |