Completed Digestion, Kidneys & Other Organs Lungs & Breathing

Gut Reaction - The Health Data Research Hub for Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Funder UKRI
Recipient organisation Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
Funding £4.8M
Period Sept 2019 — Aug 2022

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Half a million people in the UK live with inflammatory bowel disease, and more than 70% of Crohn’s patients will eventually need major surgery because current treatments work unpredictably. This matters because doctors cannot explain why one patient responds to a drug while another does not. The result is a costly cycle of trial-and-error prescribing that wastes an estimated £1.5 billion each year from UK health budgets. The core problem is not a lack of data—it is that clinical imaging, pathology results, and genomic information sit in separate systems that cannot be combined. Without integration, researchers cannot spot the patterns that link a patient’s biology to their treatment outcome. The project will build a secure digital infrastructure that connects these data sources while protecting patient privacy. If it succeeds, clinicians could match treatments to individual patients far earlier, reducing the need for surgery and cutting waste. The same data framework could later be applied to other chronic diseases. 25,000 IBD patients have already consented to share their records, giving the project a real-world foundation from the start.

View original technical description
"Crohn's Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are the main forms of IBD. They cause debilitating symptoms affecting 0.78% of the UK population (500,0001 people), and costing UK health budgets approximately £1.5 Billion2 each year. Treatment is with steroids, immunosuppressants and antibody therapies, but results are variable. Over 70% of patients with Crohn’s and 15% with colitis require major surgery3. There is an urgent need to better understand why patients respond differently to treatments in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Recent advances in clinical imaging, pathology, and genomic technologies have produced remarkable progress in understanding IBD. However, the power of these technologies cannot be clinically realised until these data can be combined and used in a meaningful way. Our DIH will integrate data from multiple sources and create a secure research resource that allows approved researchers to access data, whilst protecting the privacy of individuals. Patient and public involvement is key to our success. 25,000 IBD patients have already provided consent for their health records to be retrieved and used for medical research. Working together, we will transform our understanding of IBD, drive improvements in diagnosis and treatment, and deliver a data framework to reproduce in other disease areas."

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Ewen Cameron (Co-Investigator)John Bradley (Principal Investigator)Miles Parkes (Co-Investigator)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

IBD-RESPONSE: Defining microbial predictors of responsiveness to biological therapies in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis
The UK IBD Bioresource: translating todays science into tomorrows treatments in Crohn's disease
Therapy Personalisation using Multiomic Analyses in Inflammatory Bowel Disease – THAMES-IBD
The UK Inflammatory Bowel Disease Bioresource: Progressing from Genetics to Function and Clinical Translation in Crohn's Disease & Ulcerative Colitis
The Inflammatory Bowel Disease BioResource: Progressing From Genetics to Function and Clinical Translation in Crohn's Disease & Ulcerative Colitis

Original classification

Intramural

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.