Raja Atreya wins award for novel diagnostic method to predict treatment outcomes in Crohn's disease

Professor Raja Atreya from Medical Clinic 1 of the Erlangen University Hospital has won the 60,000€ Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Young Researchers for 2015. With his innovative diagnostic method, physicians can predict the clinical response of an expensive treatment of Crohn's disease which is associated with potential side effects. Treatment with TNF antagonists is effective in only half the patients. The other patients bear the risks of side effects without any clinical benefits of the therapy. With the award, the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation acknowledges the avenues that the novel diagnostic opens up for personalized medicine in Crohn's disease. The award will be presented by Professor Harald zur Hausen in the Paulskirche, Frankfurt.

Crohn's disease is a highly debilitating, chronic-inflammatory bowel disease. Constant diarrhea and abdominal cramps make it difficult to live a normal life. Therapies that target proinflammatory mediators in Crohn's disease have been available for some years. Some involve TNF antagonists which are therapeutic antibodies that neutralize the molecular messenger TNF. This messenger is implicated as a major factor perpetuating the disease. Since only half the patients benefit from the treatment, medical science has long been seeking a way of predicting the success of this therapy. The prize-winner has closed this gap with his research. Atreya was guided by the idea that only those medicines are effective that actually find their target. To help this process along, the prize-winner developed a novel antibody spray that makes the target molecules necessary for the success of treatment visible in endoscopic imaging prior to therapy. In a clinical trial with 25 Crohn's disease patients, he succeeded in demonstrating that patients who have a large number of target molecules for a TNF antagonist in their bowel mucosa respond better to the subsequent therapy than do patients with few target molecules. The success of this approach was underscored by a number of other factors: fewer additional medicines had to be prescribed, the intestinal mucosa healed within a year, and patients did not require surgery for complications during the trial period. The Young Researcher prize-winner and his co-workers now plan to test the new diagnostic in large-scale trials.

Comments

  1. Michael Darcy Michael Darcy United States says:

    What is the continued course for patients that are observed to have fewer targets?

The opinions expressed here are the views of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of News Medical.
Post a new comment
Post

While we only use edited and approved content for Azthena answers, it may on occasions provide incorrect responses. Please confirm any data provided with the related suppliers or authors. We do not provide medical advice, if you search for medical information you must always consult a medical professional before acting on any information provided.

Your questions, but not your email details will be shared with OpenAI and retained for 30 days in accordance with their privacy principles.

Please do not ask questions that use sensitive or confidential information.

Read the full Terms & Conditions.

You might also like...
Urine transcriptomics: A new frontier for non-invasive genitourinary disease detection