GlyHealth-IBD is a prognostic and predictive biomarker to support clinical decision-making in IBD. It is being developed by a consortium comprised of Avenna, our sister company Ludger and collaboration partners across the UK and Europe including the Translational Gastroenterology Unit (TGU), Oxford.
Ludger is our development partner for all the GlyHealth variants. The company specialises in glycomics technology to optimise the clinical performance of anti-inflammatory biologic drugs and track progression of inflammatory diseases (IDs).During the GlyHealth-IBD programme we discovered that IBD-patients have aberrant blood plasma glycomics patterns that correlate with IBD-specific inflammatory processes.
This exploratory studies demonstrated that glycan biomarkers used in Glyhealth-IBD-Escalate (GIE) outperform the clinical biomarkers (albumin and hs-CRP) for prediction of disease escalation in IBD patients.
GlyHealth-IBD glycomics biomarkers and clinical markers such as albumin and high-sensitivity C-Reactive Protein (hsCRP) were tested using a cohort consisting of 422 individuals with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) as well as control samples. Both glycomics markers and clinical markers were assessed separately to evaluate the capability of prediction of disease progression/treatment escalation.
GlyHealth-IBD greatly outperforms current biomarkers such as hsCRP and faecal calprotectin that are used for IBD management. The improvement comes from GlyHealth-IBD’s ability to reliably track current gut inflammation for IBD patients and give early warning of future IBD flares from a small sample of blood. This reduces the need for expensive, stressful colonoscopies which are the current gold standard for monitoring gut inflammation.
In some cases, clinicians, and patients are taken by surprise by the severity of a covid-19 infection. We speculate that chronic levels of inflammation, previously un-detected using conventional technology, may establish which individuals are likely to have a poorer health outcome upon infection. By knowing this patient, and clinicians are better informed as to how to manage their general health and to escalate treatment sooner, in order to prevent debilitating health outcomes now and in the future.
Test use of GlyHealth-IBD as a complementary biomarker of gut healing in clinical trials for anti-inflammatory drugs for IBD patients.
Ideally, this would include a range of therapeutic types including a biologic drug.
Test capabilities of GlyHealth-IBD as a precision medicine biomarker of Current IBD severity
Disease prognosis and tracking
Need for future treatment escalation of IBD patients, focusing on newly-diagnosed patients.
To identify immunofrail IBD patients at risk of experiencing poor health outcomes if they were to become infected with SARS-Cov-2 virus.