How will insights from genetics translate to clinical practice in inflammatory bowel disease?

ABSTRACT

Inflammatory bowel disease, consisting of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gut, which arises through an excessive immune response to the normal gut flora in a genetically susceptible host. The disease affects predominantly young adults and due to its chronic and relapsing nature gives rise to a high disease burden both financially, physically and psychologically. Current therapy still cannot prevent the need for surgical intervention in more than half of IBD patients. Consequently, advances in IBD therapy are of high importance. Recently, several new forms of targeted therapy have been introduced, which should improve surgery-free prognosis of IBD patients. Recent identification of genetic risk variants for IBD has led to new insights into the biological mechanisms of the disease, which will, in the future, lead to new targeted therapy. In the meantime repositioning of drugs from biologically similar diseases towards IBD might lead to new IBD therapies.