Sophie Restellini © ECCO

Julien Kirchgesner © ECCO

The Epidemiological Committee (EpiCom) organised the 5^th EpiCom Workshop at the ECCO’20 Congress in Vienna. The delegates were welcomed by Marieke Pierik, who introduced the concept of patient-reported outcomes (PRO) with the aid of a clinical case. The discussion continued by examining discrepancies between what a treating physician defines and sees as a response to therapy and the perceptions of the treated patient. Physician and patient may hold different views on the effectiveness of a treatment, particularly if the physician bases the evaluation of treatment success solely on improvements in clinical, biochemical and endoscopic measurements, without considering the patient’s quality of life and wellbeing. Integration of PROs into the evaluation can play a pivotal role in overcoming this issue.

Shaji Sebastian © ECCO

The mission of ClinCom is to promote investigator-initiated studies among ECCO Members. The Committee welcomes submissions from investigators and national study groups and evaluates and critically appraises the quality, feasibility and practicality of each study proposal. The 5^th IBD National Study Group Meeting, held on February 12 during the ECCO 2020 Congress, featured presentations from five investigators on proposals for high-quality collaborative studies which will be suitable for running across national study groups.

Uri Kopylov  © ECCO

This year’s 7^th ClinCom Workshop focussed on two main topics. The first session was devoted to sequencing and combination of different IBD treatments for IBD. The speakers addressed the possible biological implications of drug sequencing and the mechanistic changes in the inflammatory pathways.

Krisztina Gecse © ECCO

Peter Bossuyt © ECCO

The ECCO Congress offers an ideal opportunity to learn, share and interact. This was also the main purpose of the 5^th Basic ECCO: EduCational COurse for Industry, held on Wednesday, February 12, 2020.  The course aimed to provide corporate and non-corporate members who have recently entered the field of IBD with an introduction to IBD, focussing on the clinical essentials and ‘need-to-knows’. 104 participants from 23 countries attended the course.

Sebastian Zeissig  © ECCO

One of the main goals of ECCO is to promote IBD-related basic and clinical research as well as to foster interaction and productive collaboration among European research groups working in the IBD field. To achieve this goal, ECCO supports numerous funding schemes with different scopes including ECCO Fellowships, Grants, and Travel Awards.

Nuha Yassin © ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

As the ECCO App has been launched before the ECCO'20 Congress in Vienna, we highly recommend to listen to the introduction by the ECCO News Associate Editor, Nuha Yassin.

Ignacio Catalán-Serra © Ignacio Catalán-Serra

Nuha Yassin  © ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

We hope you are all well and are keeping safe in the current climate.

It was great to see so many friends at the 15^th ECCO congress in Vienna, which was a great success. We have a series of updates for you including a synopsis of the winning digital oral presentations, an introduction to the “Talking Global IBD” ECCO initiative and an introduction to the new ECCO App. Please get in touch via the ECCO Office if you’d like to see/read specific content in the next series of eNewsletters.

Best Wishes

Nuha Yassin

Ignacio Catalan-Serra

ECCO News Associate Editors

7,307 delegates attended the 15^th Congress of ECCO in Vienna

The 15^th Congress of ECCO – Inflammatory Bowel Diseases 2020, held on February 12-15, 2020 in Vienna, Austria, attracted a total number of 7,307 delegates from 102 different countries. Since the inaugural ECCO Congress in 2006 in Amsterdam, at which there were 350 delegates, participant numbers have steadily increased, as shown in the graph below. Despite the COVID-19 outbreak in the beginning of the year, we are happy that this high number of delegates had the chance to participate in the ECCO’20 Congress.

ECCO Congress participation 2006-2020 © ECCO

Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet © ECCO

Dear ECCO Friends,

We are going through a hard time. The first cases of COVID-19 in Europe were reported during the ECCO Congress in Vienna. The world is facing a pandemic which is not easy to treat and for which the course cannot be predicted. As IBD physicians, we are used to manage a difficult disease but not a lockdown. The ECCO spirit will help us coping with social isolation, which is the opposite of the ECCO goal. Our organization will contribute to this fight by publishing weekly interviews of worldwide experts (link to interviews) telling us how to manage our patients and how to keep moving forward during this pandemic.

Edouard Louis © ECCO

The BIOCYCLE project has now been ongoing for over 4 years. This project, funded by the European commission under the Horizon 2020 program, aims at exploring different aspects of the question of treatment de-escalation in moderate-severe Crohn’s disease, first requiring a combination therapy with anti-TNF and antimetabolites to control the disease. Once the disease has been stabilized, an unsolved question is to whether it is possible to de-escalate therapy. This question is important for several reasons including safety, tolerance, quality of life or costs to name the most prominent. Biocycle includes a randomized three arms, controlled clinical trial, called SPARE, on 200 patients in 6 European countries (France, United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands and Germany) and Australia, several patients and health care providers’ surveys in Europe and the USA, a biomarker research program and pharmaco-economic analysis. ECCO is mainly involved in the monitoring of the project (through the Sci Com and the Clin Com) and is the work package leader for dissemination of the results. Biocycle is a 7.5 years-long project and has been launched in April 2015.