About three million people in the United States suffer from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and while patients have more treatment options now than they did 10 years ago, IBD drugs don’t work for more than half of them. One reason could be that IBD, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, results from a complex interaction between a patient’s genetics, immune system, diet, environmental exposures, and microorganisms in the gut, or the microbiome — and researchers are only now beginning to tease out the interactions that really drive the disease.
Ramnik Xavier, a core institute member and co-director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, co-director of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT and a gastroenterologist who sees IBD patients at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and Daniel Graham, a senior group leader at Broad and a member of the Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease at MGH, answer our questions about how the IBD field should move forward and what the future of IBD treatment looks like.
They and others co-authored a recent review paper in Cell, where they discussed the challenges in IBD research and opportunities for better therapies.
