Grant: Project Grant

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a major global health and economic burden, especially when considering patients are also at increased risk for metabolic and neuropsychiatric conditions. Current treatment options for IBD patients are often not effective for treating IBD, and patients also suffer from co-morbid diseases. Our lab has shown that Ulcerative Colitis patients who consume the Mediterranean diet pattern can reduce damaging inflammation, improve metabolism, and improve emotional well being however, there was still room for improvement in this intervention trial. Probiotic therapy is widely believed considered a potential treatment option. However, clinical trials using probiotics for IBD treatment have had inconsistent results. In IBD patients, the gut environment is unique, for example, it is highly inflamed; these properties may interfere with the growth and, therefore beneficial effects of probiotics. As such, current probiotics are most likely inefficient at surviving in IBD patients. A novel approach is to optimize beneficial microbes that strategically target these limitations in IBD patients through techniques such as genetic engineering. Gibson created a novel optimized beneficial microbe and called BioPersist because it has a survival advantage that allows the microbe to thrive in the IBD gut. We think that BioPersist acts through an important molecule that also affects insulin resistance and behavior. We think that combining a health-promoting diet, like the Mediterranean diet pattern, with these novel probiotics, will reduce colitis and also benefit metabolic function and mental health. Our goal is to examine this novel live bacterium's (BioPersist) ability to biologically target inflammation, metabolic function, and behavior in experimental colitis with the intent that this would provide the rationale for future clinical development as a novel therapeutic for IBD that acts via the gut-brain axis and improves the gut microbiome.