The Digestive Inflammatory Pathology Research Group awarded the prize for best research project at the Catalan Digestive Medicine Conference

A study by the Digestive Inflammatory Pathology Research Group at the IGTP was awarded the best basic-translational research study in the Catalan Digestive Medicine Conference 2019.  The study presented by Dr Violeta Lorén is within one of the main research lines of the group and centres on understanding, predicting and solving one of the main complications arising from therapy for patients with ulcerative colitis: the failure of glucocorticoid treatment.

Steroid treatment is the frontline therapy for moderate and severe bouts of this complex intestinal illness, but about 40% of active patients stop responding, including those who have responded previously.  The group has developed an experimental approach based on new computational technologies in order to improve the management of patients and save them from unwanted side-effects; it will probably also improve the effectiveness of second line therapies.  The expression profiles of intestinal messenger RNAs and of small non-coding RNAs of the intestine and plasma and clinical data from patients has been integrated into a computational map that represents an up-to-date molecular network of biological activity related to corticoids and ulcerative colitis.  As a result they have identified a plausible mechanism and have applied for a patent for the panel of plasmatic mRNAs, which is capable of predicting the response to glucocorticoids in ulcerative colitis treatment.

Conference of Digestive Medicine "represents a step forward in the use of computational tools capable of organizing the pathological complexity of intestinal inflammatory disease in general and in particular ulcerative colitis, to generate new concepts of clinical use that allow us to get closer to personalized medicine," considers Lorén.
The work presented in Tarragona during the XXVIII Conference of the Catalan Society of Digestive Medicine has the title Correlation between plasma and intestinal mucosa of biological activity related to corticoid resistance in ulcerative colitis and represents an original way to select biomarkers using biological and statistical criteria.