The researchers called the discovery a “massive step forwards”.
Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis are included under the name inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and both are on the rise.
More than 500,000 people in the UK had IBD as of 2022, over twice as many as the 300,000 estimated in the past.
However, even if the illnesses are increasingly prevalent, not every patient responds well to current treatments, and efforts to create novel medications frequently fall short due to an ignorance of the underlying causes of IBD.
The crucial finding was the identification of a DNA segment that is exclusively active in specific immune cells and causes intestinal inflammation.
No medications particularly block this.
Nonetheless, it was anticipated that those currently prescribed for other non-inflammatory illnesses would work well.
Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute, UCL, and Imperial College London discovered that the drug reduced inflammation in both immune cells and intestinal samples from patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
However, this medicine has negative effects in other organs; therefore, researchers are currently attempting to figure out a way to administer it directly to immune cells.
