Treatment options for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have been limited for most of Elisa Boden, MD’s career. Until a few years ago, she and her colleagues – including James Lord, MD, PhD, and Michael Chiorean, MD – have had only a few types of medications to treat IBD. And those drugs often failed to stop the immune attacks that trigger the two forms of IBD: Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
“Only about half of IBD patients respond to those drugs – and only about 20 percent achieve remission,” says Dr. Boden, a gastroenterologist at the Virginia Mason Digestive Disease Institute and a principal investigator at the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason (BRI). “Unfortunately, this leaves many IBD patients to endure incessant digestive problems, severe pain and other symptoms that can erode their quality of life.”
The good news is that IBD treatment options are rapidly expanding and an unprecedented number of new therapies are in clinical trials. But there’s no way to predict which one will work for a particular patient. Instead, doctors must follow a ‘trial and error’ approach, and it can take months before they find the right therapy.
