Metabolism – New Therapeutic Targets for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Genetic studies conducted over the last 20 years have been hugely successful in identifying variation across the genome that is associated with disease risk. The inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) Crohnʼs disease and ulcerative colitis have been exemplars of this success, with now > 250 individual genomic risk coordinates identified. This success sometimes overshadows the more humbling fact that mechanistic understanding is very scarce for how these genetic risk factors conspire with environmental triggers to cause disease. For some risk loci, we completely lack any understanding of the very basic function of their gene products.

Publication History

Article published online:
17 November 2021

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