Source: Radio New Zealand
The Otago team will work with researchers in Australia and India on the three year study. befunky.com
Otago University researchers on a quest to develop a Covid-style test for Crohn’s disease have been given a “huge” funding boost from a United States charity.
The team has been given NZ$2.4 million for their work to identify how accurately a biomarker found in the gut can identify the often debilitating disease.
Principal investigator Richard Gearry said he hoped the work would lead to the creation of an instant test that would initially be used by doctors for diagnosis.
“Or if patients have got Crohn’s disease and we want to monitor how effective treatments are we could have a point-of-care test that patients do themselves at home – at bit like a Covid test but instead of using saliva, using faeces,” he said.
That would allow people to stay on top of their symptoms and could also mean many they would not need colonoscopies – freeing up appointments for those who do.
The funding boost has come from the Leona M and Harry B Helmsley Charitable Trust, which often funds Crohn’s-related research.
By New Zealand standards, the amount was huge and the team were extremely grateful, he said.
The Otago team would work with researchers in Australia and India on the three year study.
The number of people with Crohn’s and other inflammatory bowel diseases was growing in Western countries – and would soon make up one percent of the population.
The conditions were also on the rise in newly industrialised regions of the world, he said.
Having faster, cheaper, easier diagnosis and monitoring was essential as demand grew.
Professor Gearry said he often explained to patients that the immune system was normally very relaxed about gut bacteria – but in Crohn’s patients, it became angry.
“Then those bacteria are attacked by the immune system, and the gut wall is caught in the middle and that causes inflammation that leads to diarrhoea, abdominal pain, bleeding from the bowel and a range of things,” he said.
Early diagnosis could help doctors intervene to help patients before the disease got worse.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
