Funding outcome

Canada has one of the highest rates of Crohn's disease (CD) in children. CD can make you sick by making your intestines leaky or by blocking them so it is impossible to pass stools. People with CD often end up needing surgery for these problems. Kids with CD are very likely to need surgery at some point in their lives. Growing up with CD has a serious impact on physical and mental health. Medications can help treat CD, but some of them have serious side effects. Also, not everyone's CD is the same. When someone is diagnosed with CD, we don't know how bad it will be. This means that we don't know at first who needs heavy-duty medications and who will be fine without them. We also don't know what causes CD, but this likely includes a combination of your genes, the immune cells, and the bacteria and viruses in your gut. We want to find out which genes and immune cells are present in severe CD while also seeing where they are in the layout of the gut. If we can see exactly where they are and what else is near them, it should help us understand more about what they are doing. We want to find a signature map of changes in the genes and immune cells in children with CD who end up needing surgery. We think that this could help predict whether a child diagnosed with CD will have severe disease or not. We will need to test how good this signature map is at predicting severe CD. To do this, we will look for the signature in the initial tissues taken from colonoscopies at the time of diagnosis, and we will compare children who needed surgery with similar children who did not. Our hope is that our work will help predict who will have severe disease from when they are first diagnosed, allowing them to start on stronger medications and maybe avoid surgery.