Precision medicine to enable personalized therapy in IBD via biomarker analysis using CyTOF and multiplexed ion beam imaging.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are part of the group called inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), a medical condition where the immune system is causing severe intestinal and colonic inflammation leading to severe complications. Former therapies rely on suppressing the immune system but modern treatments, so-called biological treatments, are blocking certain steps in disease progression or activation. Those specific therapies need to be given to each patient in a precise way to optimize the treatments and thus, avoiding non-responders or predicting complications before starting the treatment is paramount. Here we plan to develop a new assay to personalize each patient’s treatment by measuring all characteristics, so-called bio markers, of the individual patient at once by a modern technology called CyTOF and MIBI. Up to a hundred of those tests can be investigated simultaneously and thus, the physician can choose the optimal drug and better understand each patient’s disease.