Balfour Sartor, MD, and Shehzad Sheikh, MD, PhD, are co-principal investigators of a large grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust to conduct translational research that will predict recurrence after surgery for Crohn’s disease.
The Helmsley grant, “Genomic and Microbial Signatures Predict Post-Operative Disease Outcomes in Crohn’s Disease,” provides $2,334,750 over three years to enable researchers to identify genomic (RNA and microRNA) and microbial (metagenomic and metabolomic) profiles that predict development of either aggressive post-op recurrence of Crohn’s disease or lack of recurrence.
Sartor, the Midget Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and founder of the UNC Multidisciplinary IBD Center, credits Sheikh’s long-term efforts to create a deep biobank of exquisitely clinically phenotyped IBD patients and proof of concepts in published studies.
Sheikh is Associate Professor of Medicine in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and Associate Professor of Genetics.
“I am immensely proud of the growth of the IBD translational research program under Shehzad’s leadership and look forward to the results of these studies impacting the management of IBD patients,” said Sartor. “This has been my career-long objective, and I am absolutely thrilled to see a light at the end of the tunnel of translating decades of research to clinical application.”
Sartor added the grant will build upon an ongoing parallel Takeda contract to create an exceptionally deep biobank of resected tissues, colonoscopic biopsies and serial serum and fecal samples at the time of surgical resection for Crohn’s disease, and for the six-month post-op follow-up.
“In concert with the multi-omic analyses (RNASeq, microRNA sequencing, fecal aliquots characterized by whole genome sequencing [metagenomics] and metabolomic analyses and a library of enteroids and colonoids derived from a subset of these patients at the time of the colonoscopic biopsies, we will have an incredible resource to build spin off NIH grant applications, K-awards for our Basic Science T32 trainees that can leverage this platform to expand IBD translational research at UNC.”