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Helmsley awards $5 million to study rise of IBD in Asia
The Australasian Gastro Intestinal Research Foundation and the Chinese University of Hong Kong received $5.2 million in grants to investigate the environmental factors contributing to the rise of inflammatory bowel disease, and specifically Crohn’s disease, in Asia, according to a press release.
“The rise of Crohn’s disease in the East presents a golden opportunity to essentially travel back in time and study the origin of a disease using 21st-century knowledge and techniques,” Siew Ng, PhD, MRCP, FHKCP, FHKAM, from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), said in the release. “By pinning down dietary and bacteria changes that are most important, we may have a shot at preventing new cases and slowing the global rise of Crohn’s disease.”
The 3-year grants provided by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust will enable researchers in China and Australia who are part of the Eastern Inflammatory Bowel Disease Gut Microbiota, or ENIGMA, consortium to detect microbial organisms and related dietary factors that impact the growth of Crohn’s disease in areas where the rates of IBD have been rapidly rising.
The Australasian Gastro Intestinal Research Foundation will examine key triggers of Crohn’s disease in Australia, which has one of the highest rates of the disease globally, and the CUHK team will examine China and Hong Kong, where the disease rate is quickly increasing. By studying Crohn’s disease across different populations, the ENIGMA consortium will gain a wide-ranging understanding of how environmental factors affect the disease, which they hope will lead to the development of the best dietary and bacterial modification therapies for treating Crohn’s.
“As Crohn’s disease becomes more common across industrialized societies, the ENIGMA consortium will have a pivotal role in understanding and preventing the global increase of the disease,” Garabet Yeretssian, PhD, director of the Helmsley Charitable Trust’s IBD and Crohn’s Disease Program, said in the release. “This kind of expansive and groundbreaking research is needed to develop interventions that limit the global rise in disease incidence, and brings us closer to finding cures for Crohn’s disease.”
Disclosures: Yeretssian is the director of the IBD and Crohn’s Disease Program at the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.