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Future biologic targets for IBD: potentials and pitfalls

Gil Y Melmed1, Stephan R Targan

  • 1Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center, Division of Gastroenterology, Department of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 8635 West 3rd Street, 960-W Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA. melmedg@cshs.org

Nature Reviews. Gastroenterology & Hepatology
|February 6, 2010
PubMed

The treatment of patients with IBD has evolved towards biologic therapy, which seeks to target specific immune and biochemical abnormalities at the molecular and cellular level. Multiple genes have been associated with susceptibility to IBD, and many of these can be linked to alterations in immune pathways. These immune pathways provide avenues for understanding the pathogenesis of IBD and suggest future drug targets, such as the IL-12-IL-23 pathway. In addition, failed therapeutic drug trials can provide valuable information about pitfalls in study design, drug delivery and disease activity assessment. Future biologic drug development will benefit from the early identification of subsets of patients who are most likely to respond to therapy by use of biological markers of genetic susceptibility or immunologic susceptibility.

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