TRR241 Immune-epithelial communication in IBD

The IBDome is designated to merge multi-omics datasets from inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients with corresponding clinical information in an integrated platform and to provide access to these to all projects of the TRR 241 consortium. Our long-term aim is to establish one of the largest IBD omics and clinical database available for public access. In the first funding period, we successfully achieved all our major aims: 1) Collection and standardization of patient samples and clinical data management. 2) Acquisition of experimental and systems biology data from the collected samples . 3) Development and maintenance of a web-based database and analytical pipelines for the integration and analysis of molecular, cellular, and clinical data. Building on the achievements of the first funding period, the overall goal in the second funding period is to further expand and develop the multistep approach of the installed IBDome as a pivotal nexus between basic science and clinical research to provide extended translational insights into IBD pathogenesis. In the second funding period, we will not only increase patient numbers of our cohorts and implement a long-term follow-up in the existing cohorts, but also generate complementary data using novel profiling approaches (spatial proteomics and single-cell RNAseq) and include additional pre-specified cohorts of patients that will enable us to correlate molecular analyses with the clinical course of the disease and the assessed therapeutic responses. Implementation of the recently founded Translational Board proved to be an important instrument to determine clinically relevant analyses of our collected samples and it is planned to systematically expand the role of this committee comprising of expert gastroenterologists as well as basic scientist and bioinformatics experts in the second funding period.