Published online Feb 21, 2020. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v26.i7.696
Peer-review started: November 25, 2019
First decision: December 23, 2019
Revised: January 2, 2020
Accepted: February 10, 2020
Article in press: February 10, 2020
Published online: February 21, 2020
Processing time: 87 Days and 7.2 Hours
Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are chronic and relapsing inflammatory conditions of the gut that include Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. The pathogenesis of IBD is not completely unraveled, IBD are multi-factorial diseases with reported alterations in the gut microbiota, activation of different immune cell types, changes in the vascular endothelium, and alterations in the tight junctions’ structure of the colonic epithelial cells. Proteomics represents a useful tool to enhance our biological understanding and to discover biomarkers in blood and intestinal specimens. It is expected to provide reproducible and quantitative data that can support clinical assessments and help clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of IBD. Sometimes a differential diagnosis of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis and the prediction of treatment response can be deducted by finding meaningful biomarkers. Although some non-invasive biomarkers have been described, none can be considered as the “gold standard” for IBD diagnosis, disease activity and therapy outcome. For these reason new studies have proposed an “IBD signature”, which consists in a panel of biomarkers used to assess IBD. The above described approach characterizes “omics” and in this review we will focus on proteomics.
Core tip: Patients' heterogeneity is a hallmark for inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). Some patients present limited bowel involvement and a mild course of the disease, others develop very extensive, aggressive disease and variable response to therapy. In IBD, there is a great need of patient stratification and of new biomarkers as part of a personalized medicine approach to patient care. Biological therapies are more and more widely used for IBD patients, because of their efficacy in patient’s refractory to other drugs; still, biological treatments fail in 20%-40% of patients and, to date, no reliable clinical or molecular predictor of response to biological therapeutic strategy has been described. This review aims to collect the "omics" approach for research of serological biomarkers of diagnosis, response to specific biological therapies in the IBD field.