Here are five observations:
1. Established nearly two years ago with a gift to Weill Cornell medicine from longtime benefactor Jill Roberts, the Jill Roberts Institute uses a multidisciplinary approach to drive and then translate discoveries into new preventative and treatment strategies for IBD.
2. The institute and its five primary investigators have already made advances in describing the molecular underpinnings of IBD, exploring how host genetics, the immune system, the microbiota and pathways that control inflammation influence the disease’s development and progression.
3. Recent studies published in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Immunology and PNAS show how the intestines repair themselves after daily attacks from microbes and other environmental triggers. A defect in this repair system contributes to IBD.
4. Iliyan Iliev, PhD, a researcher with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, is the institute’s most recent recruit. He investigates the fungi that colonize the intestine and how it operates in both healthy and unhealthy intestines.
5. The institute and medical center are building a new IBD patient live cell bank that will provide deeper insight into disease subtypes and how best to treat them. So far, the institute has collected 300 samples from adult IBD patients.
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