Grant: Doctoral Research Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a lifelong, chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract. It affects 1 in 150 Canadians, one of the highest rates in the world. A common and serious complication of Crohn's disease is narrowing in the bowel, which stops movement of bowel contents out of the body. The cause of this is often buildup of scar tissue (or fibrosis) due to uncontrolled bowel inflammation. Once a section of bowel becomes fibrotic and non-functional, surgery is the only treatment available. Despite advances in treating bowel inflammation to prevent fibrosis, over 50% of IBD patients require surgery in their lifetime. This is often due to mild/moderate inflammation that goes unnoticed and untreated, due to a lack of serious symptoms. As such, there is a critical need to not only identify active disease (regions of inflammation) within the bowel, but also measure disease progression (degree of fibrosis present). Molecular imaging allows us to see the biology of tissues, and not just their physical appearance. This approach takes advantage of protein-based markers of disease present in blood vessels during the early stages of disease progression. We aim to design an approach for detecting and measuring active inflammation and fibrosis in a single session using positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Our objectives are: 1) to test and refine a PET contrast agent that we have previously constructed, which attaches to and identifies inflamed blood vessels; 2) to validate an advanced, quantitative MRI sequence to measure fibrosis in humans with IBD; 3) to combine our PET contrast agent and MRI sequence to image active inflammation and fibrosis simultaneously using PET-MRI. This novel imaging approach has the potential to help clinicians detect inflammation early and assess the degree of fibrosis present, giving them the information required to personalize treatment and reduce the need for surgery.