Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic relapsing inflammatory disorder of the bowel. Millions of patients suffer from this debilitating disease and are consequently predisposed to increased risk of developing colorectal cancer. The primary goal of this study is to develop less-invasive serum biomarkers for IBD and provide mechanistic insights into disease progression. Therefore, we first used metabolomics and lipidomics to discover serum biomarkers in an animal model, followed by further validation using human patients. Rag2-/- mice infected with Helicobacter hepaticus have been developed as an animal model to imitate naturally occurring inflammatory events and associated key features of chronic inflammatory responses in humans.  Our metabolomics and lipidomics profiling revealed that numerous metabolite pathways and molecular species dramatically changed in the animal model and IBD patients. Particularly, tryptophan-related metabolites and activated sphingolipids may serve as promising serum biomarkers for IBD to stratify patients for better therapeutic treatments.

Omics-based biomarker discovery for inflammatory bowel disease: From animal models to human patients

244th National Meeting (2012)

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