Proteomics in Ulcerative Colitis

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory illness of the gastrointestinal tract. It follows a relapsing and remitting pattern throughout the course of the disease. The two major types of IBD are Ulcerative colitis (UC) and Crohn’s disease (CD). Despite recent advances in decoding the pathophysiology of IBD, many questions regarding the disease pathogenesis and the complex interactions between the putative contributors including genetic susceptibility, immunological dysregulation, role of commensal bacteria and various environmental factors remain unanswered. Furthermore, there are limited available prognostic indicators of disease activity and cancer progression in IBD. Proteins can be considered the main functional units of cells as almost all intracellular physiological functions as well as inter-cellular interactions are dependent on them. Proteomics (the study of the whole set of proteins that can be encoded by the genome of an organism or a cell) provides the opportunity to evaluate the cellular biological system at the functional level. Understanding of the proteome composition and alterations will yield new insights into IBD pathogenesis as well as identification of candidate biomarkers of disease activity, mucosal healing and cancer progression. The aim of this body of work is to investigate proteomics alterations in UC in search of biomarker discovery and further delineation of the disease pathophysiology.