Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), typically classified into ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, afflicts more than 200,000 individuals in Canada. IBD results from inappropriate response of the immune system to bacteria normally found in the gut. The gut is continously exposed to a large number of bacteria of different types. These gut bacteria provide all the molecules that normally lead to a strong immune response in the context of a wound. However, the immune system of the gut (the mucosal immune system) does not normally respond. The reasons why there is not a continual immune response to gut bacteria are not clear. The project proposes to examine information describing the immune response to gut bacteria in normal and diseased model animals as well as for human. A large and growing body of information is available that describes how the different parts of the immune system interact. However, the number of interactions that are known are so vast that important differences between normal and disease situations are not obvious; we have previously constructed (with collaborators) a database resource that houses an extensive collection of these interactions to aid analysis (InnateDB). We will examine these interactions, in combination with new and old data for diseased and healthy animals, to identify key differences. In the past, we have identified short proteins that are capable of changing the way that the immune system behaves in experimental animals. We will seek to integrate our knowledge of these agents with the key differences in immune response in order to propose new treatments for IBD.