Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is affecting over 6.8 million people globally. It’s a group of disorders that cause repetitive and painful episodes of epithelial damage and inflammation in the human gut. Currently, there is no cure for the disease. In order to change that, we are interested in studying intestinal regeneration mechanisms that would enable us to develop new intervention and stem cell transplantation strategies to better treat the IBD patients.
Impact
We are using 3D mini-guts – organoids – to study important regeneration mechanisms of intestinal epithelium to develop new treatment and transplantation strategies for patients with intestinal damage. Development of organoid-based therapies would open up new avenues for treating diseases that affect the integrity of intestinal epithelium, including IBD. You are looking at the intestinal organoid shining like a moon over its successful engraftment into the intestinal wound bed.
reNEW research
We have identified a novel transcription factor that shows high promise in regulating intestinal cell fate changes during epithelial injury, sheding new insights into the mechanisms of intestinal repair.
Image description
You are looking at the intestinal organoid shining like a moon over its successful engraftment into the intestinal wound bed. Two images (organoid image + engraftment image) have been overlaid via Photoshop without tampering the original images.
Credits
Dr. Kadi Lõhmussaar, Jensen lab, reNEW Copenhagen.