The European Crohn's and Colitis Organisation (ECCO) has long recognised that excellent IBD care depends not only on new scientific discoveries or clinical trials, but on the people who deliver the care, across every discipline of the multidisciplinary team: clinicians and surgeons, scientists, nurses, dietitians and allied health professionals.
The four ECCO Fellowships showcased here capture that ambition. Open to early-career scientists and clinicians who are still in training or under 40, and to every discipline, the Fellowship scheme enables recipients to visit leading European centres, master new techniques and bring both knowledge and collaborations back to their home institutions. What emerges is rarely a single project; it is a durable network, the cross-border exchange that has long defined ECCO. Previous fellowships have received overwhelmingly positive feedback, and not only from the fellows: host institutions have benefited just as much from the collaboration and exchange of ideas that lies at the heart of ECCO's pursuit of excellence.
The dietitians and nurses who play such important roles in IBD care have historically had far fewer routes to research funding than their medical colleagues, despite being responsible for much of the day-to-day work of disease management. ECCO created the D-ECCO and N-ECCO Grants precisely to close that gap. The two D-ECCO and four N-ECCO reports presented here show what dedicated support unlocks: rigorous, clinically grounded work in nutrition and nursing that strengthens the evidence base for the whole team. It gives our nursing and dietetic colleagues both the room to explore new avenues that will take IBD care to its next level and the ability to build lasting collaborative networks.
Taken together, these projects are a reminder that ECCO's investment reaches well beyond the laboratory bench. By backing early-career investigators and the wider multidisciplinary workforce, ECCO is building the expertise, and the community, that our patients will depend on for years to come.
