Introduction to our new P-ECCO Committee Member 2025
Dror Shouval, P-ECCO Committee Chair
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Dror Shouval |
As the chair of the P-ECCO Committee, it is my pleasure to introduce the newly elected member of the Committee, Eileen Crowley, a paediatric gastroenterologist from London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario, Canada.
Eileen completed her medical degree and Higher Specialist Training with the Royal College of Physicians, Ireland. She then moved to the Hospital of SickKids in Toronto, where she completed a Pediatric Gastroenterology Fellowship and a sub-specialty IBD Fellowship. While in Toronto, she first-authored a seminal paper that was published in Gastroenterology in 2020, entitled: “Prevalence and Clinical Features of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Associated With Monogenic Variants, Identified by Whole-Exome Sequencing in 1000 Children at a Single Center”. This work has served to better delineate the genetic phenotype of children with IBD, as well as optimising response to therapy in this age group.
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Currently, Eileen is the Co-Chair of the Ontario Pediatric IBD Coalition which advocates at a provincial level for resources for children with IBD. She is also the Co-Chair of the CIDsCaNN Executive Committee, the national Canadian paediatric IBD network which supports up to 70 pediatric IBD researchers and educators to collaborate across Canada. Eileen‘s current research focuses on various aspects related to paediatric IBD, including clinical trial endpoints, regulatory mechanisms for clinical trials, therapeutic drug monitoring and precision medicine. One of the main problems in drug approval for paediatric IBD patients is the extremely long delay between adult and paediatric approvals. Eileen is keen to improve this situation, and her recent work highlighted the need for development of validated clinical indices, extrapolation of results from adult trials, pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic studies, and novel designs to accelerate drug development for children.
The mission of P-ECCO is to increase our understanding of paediatric IBD and advance care and outcomes of children with IBD by supporting clinical, health services and biomedical research, which strongly aligns with Eileen’s clinical and research interests, and I am confident she will contribute significantly to P-ECCO’s work. The power of P-ECCO lies in the opportunity for collaboration at an international level in order to foster and translate high quality scientific endeavors to the international paediatric IBD community. Eileen will for sure help to move this field forward. Welcome, Eileen!
Please allow me to sincerely thank Richard Hansen for his devotion to our committee. Richard was one of the people in charge of the ECCO Consensus paper on diet and nutrition in IBD, which will be published soon and will be an important resource for providers in the field of IBD. Richard will be hugely missed! We wish you all the best and look forward to continuing our collaboration beyond the committee tasks.