Inflammatory Bowel Disease Research

The focus of the multi-center research program which I lead is to discover underlying mechanisms and better therapeutic approaches in the broad area of chronic inflammation, growth, and mucosal healing as it relates to adult and pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).

A particular emphasis currently is to define mechanisms which link neutralizing GM-CSF auto-antibodies which we have discovered to neutrophil dysfunction and more severe small bowel Crohn’s Disease (CD), using both murine and patient-based approaches, and to develop new diagnostic biomarkers based upon this observation.

My second focus area is utilizing next generation sequencing (NGS) approaches to define the intestinal microbial community and host global pattern of gene expression relative to clinical outcomes in large prospective pediatric IBD inception cohorts. These studies will identify mechanisms of disease which affect both growth and mucosal inflammation in patients with IBD, and will guide the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics.