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Inflammatory Bowel disease (IBD) is a generalized name for two chronic inflammatory conditions in the gastrointestinal tract – Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease. The prevalence of IBD is estimated to be above 10 million patients globally, with common diagnosis seen at ages 15-30. These chronic inflammatory conditions often require life-long therapeutic control.  

However, high heterogeneity in disease manifestations and treatment response, both clinically and on the molecular level have made finding appropriate therapeutics a personalized endeavor, with patients often receiving progressively stronger medications in an approach commonly referred to as ‘step up therapy’. This approach of trial-and-error often leads to eventually finding appropriate drugs for many patients, but can entail significant loss of time, high expenses, and, more importantly, continued impact on the patient’s quality of life.      

Over the past decades, molecular (from biopsy samples) and clinical (e.g. disease severity scores) data have been collected from IBD patients in numerous clinical trials and settings. At CytoReason we’ve been diligently collecting, annotating, standardizing, and integrating the available public domain data into comprehensive AI-driven computational models, and adding proprietary customer-specific data to tailor-fit the models to answer customer-specific questions. 

Specifically, CytoReason’s IBD models are some of our most data-rich models, each including dozens of datasets, thousands of samples, numerous treatments, and response data. However, the availability of public domain clinically annotated molecular samples (i.e. “real-world data”) is somewhat limited and corresponding molecular findings with clinical measures remains a challenge. Moreover, as clinical measures are key determinants in assessing disease status, including clinical trial outcome assessments, corresponding molecular and clinical measures is of utmost importance.   

The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation (CCF) is a world leader in IBD research since its founding almost 60 years ago, and has been funding cutting edge research and clinical trials. They’ve gathered wide-ranging clinical and molecular data from thousands of patients at various stages of disease, as well as a multitude of therapeutic data. These include the Foundation’s IBD Plexus® which is comprised of real-world data from thousands of patient intestinal biopsies.     

As such, the newly announced seminal data collaboration agreement between CCF and CytoReason is a leap forward for researchers, drug developers and, ultimately, patients. The integration of the vast CCF datasets, and their clinically annotated molecular data, with CytoReason’s advanced IBD models is bound to strengthen the models on multiple levels and analysis layers. This will further enable disease subtype characterization, treatment positioning, and combination therapy for the various subtypes, as well as generate blood-based biomarkers to facilitate clinical trials. Moreover, the integrated models will enable natural disease molecular trajectory characterization for different drug effects. Altogether, this will deepen our understanding of IBD at the molecular level, and enable our partners to develop more targeted therapies, faster.