News on ClinCom Structure

Laurent Beaugerie currently chairs the Department of Gastroenterology at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris, France. He has been contributing to the field of IBD for over 30 years. The focus of his research is the natural history and the complications of IBD. In the early 2000s, he initiated and coordinated the French observational CESAME cohort, which aimed to better understand and prevent malignancies related to IBD and/or to immunosuppressive treatment. In 2009 the CESAME study group was the first to quantify the risk of thiopurine-associated lymphoproliferative disorders (Beaugerie L et al., Lancet 2009). Since 2009 he has also chaired the Scientific Committee of I-CARE, a European prospective observational cohort on IBD outcomes. In 2014 he was one of the working group leaders for the European Evidence-Based Consensus: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Malignancies (Annese V et al., J Crohns Colitis 2015). His commitment to ECCO, first as an ECCO National Representative for France (2008–14) and later as an EpiCom Member (2016–19), was fuelled by a strong belief in pan-European cooperation as the basis for establishing world leadership in IBD research.

Peter Bossuyt is a consultant gastroenterologist at Imelda General Hospital in Bonheiden, Belgium, where he is the co-director of the IBD service and research unit. Having published over 50 peer-reviewed publications (h-index: 12), he is currently conducting his PhD at the University of Leuven, focussing on endoscopic and imaging endpoints. He chairs the Scientific Committee of the Belgian IBD Research and Development group (BIRD), which has introduced robust assessment of study proposals to improve the quality of investigator-initiated clinical trials. Between 2014 and 2018 he was an ECCO National Representative for Belgium; since 2015 he has been a member of the JCC Editorial Board and in 2018 he became a participant in the ECCO GRADE CD Treatment Guideline project. Peter’s determination to optimise the quality of independent IBD clinical research and his broad experience within the academic and non-academic settings will certainly contribute greatly to ClinCom.

Shaji Sebastian leads the integrated clinical and research IBD service (IBD Hull) at Hull University Teaching Hospitals at Hull in the UK. He also co-leads the local NIHR gastroenterology specialty research portfolio. His research focus includes epidemiology of IBD, transition care, pharmacogenomics and new therapies in IBD and he has published widely on IBD. He was an active member and is currently a member of of the EPI-IBD Study Group's steering committee and sits on the ECCO-CONFER Task Force. In recent years, he has participated in several ECCO Consensus Guidelines (Harbord M et al., J Crohn Colitis 2017; Gionchetti P et al., J Crohns Colitis 2017), Scientific Workshops (Sebastian S et al., J Crohn Colitis 2014; Gecse et al., J Crohn Colitis 2016) and Topical Reviews (Doherty G et al., J Crohn Colitis 2018; Sturm A et al., J Crohn Colitis 2017). Sebs’s broad experience in clinical research and in ECCO Initiatives will be invaluable to ClinCom.

ClinCom Members © ECCO

At the same time, we had to say goodbye to Marc Ferrante, John Mansfield and Javier Gisbert. Marc became a member of ClinCom in 2015 and has been energetically coordinating the many diverse activities over the past two years as Committee Chair. As of 2019, he has been an elected member of SciCom. John and Javier joined ClinCom in 2016. Javier has been active on the UR-CARE Steering Committee from the start and coordinated the National Study Group Meetings. John was in the lead in setting up the 3^rd School for Clinical Trialists and was responsible for the external protocol reviews and follow-ups. We are grateful to Marc, John and Javier for their dedicated commitment to ClinCom: It has been an honour to work together.