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ECCO News 2023/1

Volume 18, Issue 1

Joana Gaifem, ECCO Grant Awardee
Joana Gaifem, ECCO Grant Awardee
Dietary interventions have been shown to ameliorate symptoms in patients with mild or moderate IBD. Nevertheless, these therapies are only effective for a subset of patients, raising the need for novel dietary intervention strategies that aim to prevent IBD development. Glycosylation is a major post-translational mechanism characterised by the addition of carbohydrate structures, called glycans, to essentially all cells. We have revealed that mucosal T cells from Ulcerative Colitis patients exhibit alterations in mucosal glycosylation, which positively correlate with T cell hyperactivity...
Laure Maes, ECCO Grant Awardee
Laure Maes, ECCO Grant Awardee
Persistent fatigue severely affects the quality of life of IBD patients and reduces their ability to work. Although IBD patients, even when in clinical remission, report fatigue as one of the most disabling symptoms of their chronic disease, disease management is often only focused on attenuating gastrointestinal symptoms. In order to develop effective therapeutic interventions, a better understanding of what is causing IBD-associated fatigue is required. Therefore, the goal of this project is to develop a human gut-blood-brain in vitro model to explore the impact of active and extinguished gu
Bahtiyar Yilmaz, ECCO Grant Awardee
Bahtiyar Yilmaz, ECCO Grant Awardee
The relationship between host and microbiota can turn negative, leading to changes in microbial composition and metabolism that result in diseases such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Enteropathogenic strains increase due to the presence of reactive oxygen species in an altered metabolic environment. This study aims to understand how an IBD microbiota carrying an oxidative stress signature adapts over time and how these strains contribute to the disease's trajectory and fluctuations of oxidative stress in the outer mucus layer. Aim 1: To isolate and characterise the capacity of freshly i
Felix Grabherr, ECCO Grant Awardee
Felix Grabherr, ECCO Grant Awardee
Dietary lipids are associated with risk of developing Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Activity of glutathione peroxidase 4 (GPX4), an anti-oxidative selenoenzyme, is impaired in intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) from patients with ileal Crohn’s Disease (CD). GPX4 controls intestinal inflammation triggered by dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) and dietary PUFA uptake is associated with CD flares. SR-BI (encoded by Scarb1) is a membrane-bound receptor, mainly reported to be involved in the uptake of cholesterol, and cholesterol uptake has been described to play a role in ferroptosis
Sofía Frigerio, ECCO Grant Awardee
Sofía Frigerio, ECCO Grant Awardee
Chronic colonic inflammation in patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease increases the risk of colitis-associated cancer (CAC). Although mouse studies have been instrumental in understanding CAC development, the immune cell composition and the role of these immune cells in human CAC are largely unknown. In this study, we aim to decipher the composition and characteristics of immune cells in close proximity to dysplastic pre-cancerous lesions and cancers in IBD patients, and to decipher possible interactions between epithelial cells and the underlying immune cell populations in these...