Grant: Project Grant

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) like Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis affect nearly 250,000 Canadians, and more than 10,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. IBD is characterized by periods of extreme gastrointestinal dysfunction, which significantly impacts patient quality-of-life. IBD patient care involves multiple drugs and may require invasive surgeries if drug intervention is unsuccessful. Collectively, the impact on Canada's economy, in work force and health care costs exceeds $2.8 billion annually. Although the exact cause of IBD is unknown, current treatment strategies aim to suppress the inappropriate and hyperactive intestinal immune responses. However, these immunoregulatory treatments can increase susceptibility to viral infection, a side effect that further diminishes patient quality of life and contributes to IBD-related hospital admissions. New treatment strategies are necessary, and ideally would result in successful control of disease symptoms without increasing the risk of infection. The goal of this research is to test the efficacy of newly discovered family of compounds (called ascarosides) to limit IBD-like symptoms. Ascarosides are natural by-products of intestinal worms. Notably, intestinal worms can prevent IBD in mice and are currently being tested as a new IBD treatment for humans. Our new preliminary data suggests that ascarosides can ameliorate IBD symptoms by altering the disease-associated hyperactive immune response in the intestines but do not impair the ability to clear viral infection. Using ascarosides could by-pass the need to utilize live worms as therapy, which is both unappealing to patients and has unknown side effects. Ascarosides have the potential to be highly efficacious and cost-effective small molecule drugs, with minimal adverse effects. Investing in Canadian research that aims to pioneer the pre-clinical drug testing for this product has the potential to considerably improve IBD patient quality of life.