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Multiomics to elucidate inflammatory bowel disease risk factors and pathways

Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology volume 19, pages 399–409 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an immune-mediated disease of the intestinal tract, with complex pathophysiology involving genetic, environmental, microbiome, immunological and potentially other factors. Epidemiological data have provided important insights into risk factors associated with IBD, but are limited by confounding, biases and data quality, especially when pertaining to risk factors in early life. Multiomics platforms provide granular high-throughput data on numerous variables simultaneously and can be leveraged to characterize molecular pathways and risk factors for chronic diseases, such as IBD. Herein, we describe omics platforms that can advance our understanding of IBD risk factors and pathways, and available omics data on IBD and other relevant diseases. We highlight knowledge gaps and emphasize the importance of birth, at-risk and pre-diagnostic cohorts, and neonatal blood spots in omics analyses in IBD. Finally, we discuss network analysis, a powerful bioinformatics tool to assemble high-throughput data and derive clinical relevance.

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Fig. 1: Complex pathways lead to IBD.
Fig. 2: Differences in the application of early life cohorts and pre-diagnostic cohorts in characterizing various omics signatures of IBD during different periods of life.
Fig. 3: Applications from neonatal screening.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Gregory, Certified Medical Illustrator, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, for the illustrations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

    Manasi Agrawal & Jean-Frederic Colombel

  2. Center for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Department of Clinical Medicine, Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Manasi Agrawal, Kristine H. Allin & Tine Jess

  3. Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, Aalborg University Hospital, Aalborg, Denmark

    Kristine H. Allin & Tine Jess

  4. Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

    Francesca Petralia

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  1. Manasi Agrawal
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Correspondence to Manasi Agrawal.

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M.A. is supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (K23DK129762-01). J.-F.C. has received research grants from AbbVie, Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Takeda; has received payment for lectures from AbbVie, Amgen, Allergan, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Shire and Takeda; has received consulting fees from AbbVie, Amgen, Arena Pharmaceuticals, Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol Myers Squibb, Celgene Corporation, Eli Lilly, Ferring Pharmaceuticals, Galmed Research, Glaxo Smith Kline, Geneva, Iterative Scopes, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Kaleido Biosciences, Landos, Otsuka, Pfizer, Prometheus, Sanofi, Takeda and TiGenix; and holds stock options in Intestinal Biotech Development. K.H.A., F.P. and T.J. declare no competing interests.

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Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology thanks Anne Griffiths and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Comparative Toxicogenomics Database: http://ctdbase.org/

Human Glycome Project: https://human-glycome.org/

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Agrawal, M., Allin, K.H., Petralia, F. et al. Multiomics to elucidate inflammatory bowel disease risk factors and pathways. Nat Rev Gastroenterol Hepatol 19, 399–409 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41575-022-00593-y

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