Mitochondrial DAMPs as biomarkers for gut inflammation in Crohn's
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Mitochondrial DAMPs as mechanistic biomarkers of mucosal inflammation in Crohn's disease (MUSIC).
IRAS ID
262708
Contact name
Gwo-Tzer Ho
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Glasgow
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 31 days
Research summary
Our study focuses on the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD), Crohn's disease (CD) and Ulcerative colitis (UC). IBD is a common (~300 000 individuals in UK) chronic relapsing inflammatory condition affecting the gastrointestinal tract. People with IBD often cannot control their bowels and get abdominal pain, diarrhoea and extreme tiredness. They can become very unwell with malnutrition and complications such as infections and gut perforation. Their quality of life is badly affected - particularly mental well-being and ability to work.
In IBD, the most important goal in treatment is complete mucosal healing - the full return to normal and healthy gut lining with the healing of all ulcers seen during active disease. For IBD patients, complete mucosal healing leads to the best prognosis of long term remission. Currently, we do not have the necessary clinical tests that can reliably inform the patients or doctors whether the inflamed bowel has healed or not.
The MUSIC project will study individuals who have presented with an active flare of IBD, requiring medical treatment and test the role of damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), how well this set of ‘biomarkers’ along with current standard tests in monitoring gut inflammation and whether complete healing has been achieved.
DAMPs are molecules that are released during damage to tissue (in this case, the gut in IBD), known as self 'danger-signals' that activate inflammation. We have shown that DAMPs are released during active IBD and they may be useful in assessing the level of gut wall inflammation in IBD.
In order to study how well our DAMP levels compared to standard clinical tests, we aim to prospectively assess participants with CD over 1-year with (6-monthly ileo-colonoscopies) and 3-monthly blood and stool tests, Our aim is to find a potentially more accurate test that can inform patients/doctors on gut mucosal inflammation/healing, which will eventually replace the need for future invasive ileo-colonoscopies (as the only present way to tell if the bowel wall has healed completely).
REC name
East of Scotland Research Ethics Service REC 1
REC reference
19/ES/0087
Date of REC Opinion
17 Sep 2019
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion