Centre for Genomic & Experimental Medicine
Centre for Genomic & Experimental Medicine

Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis

Novel therapies and biomarker discovery in IBD.

The Gastroenterology unit runs a number of clinical research projects investigating the pathogenesis, epidemiology and management of the chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The assessment of novel therapies is a key focus of clinical research, with studies of new biological agents, assessment of efficacy of available immuno-modulators, and early studies of stem cell technology in Crohn’s disease on-going in Edinburgh.

A series of nation-wide and international studies are co-ordinated from our Unit, for example the IBD biomarker discovery projects, IBD-Biom (http://www.ibdbiom.eu/) and IBD-Character (http://www.ibdcharacter.eu/). These two projects are collaborating to further advance our understanding of IBD for the benefit of the patients.

BIOCYCLE (http://biocycle-project.eu/) aims to assess long-term treatment strategies in Crohn’s disease. The core part of the BIOCYCLE project is a randomised controlled trial called SPARE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6UnDT-ZVI0&feature=youtu.be).