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The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America (CCFA) announced today that it has been awarded two grants totaling $10 million from The Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

Over 1.4 million American adults and children suffer from Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, chronic and often debilitating digestive diseases, and CCFA is the world’s largest nonprofit organization dedicated to finding a cure. The funds will support Foundation’s Human Gut Microbiome Initiative and 13 research awards.

The Human Gut Microbiome Initiative will have wide-reaching implications for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis patients. It will help create improved diagnostic tests, and help develop less toxic and more effective individualized treatments for patients. Led by Jeffrey Gordon, MD, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Robert Knight, PhD, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, the Human Gut Microbiome Initiative was launched in 2008. The goal is to investigate the role microbes play in the development of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Prior to the project launch, investigators understood that intestinal microbial agents have a key role in causing Crohn’s and colitis, but did not have the tools to identify the enormously complex bacteria, viruses, and fungi that live in the human gut. Nor did they understand how they co-exist.

Through this research, Drs. Gordon and Knight and their teams have gained new insights into the composition, gene functions, and protein expression of bacteria in normal individuals. They have developed bioinformatic tools that can be widely applied to this new field of research, in addition to accessible tools to analyze the vast data generated. The grant will support the completion of the project, look at a small sample of Crohn’s disease twin pairs, and expand to a multi-institution consortium that aims to increase our understanding of intestinal microbiota in subsets of Crohn’s and colitis patients and how these bacteria, fungi, and viruses cause disease in genetically susceptible individuals.

The Foundation believes that the future of scientific progress, and our best hope for a cure for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, lies in both innovation and collaboration. In order to expedite research advances leading to a cure, collaboration across institutions and disciplines is needed.   

“The Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation is grateful that The Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust grant is making it possible for the Foundation to take the Human Gut Microbiome Initiative to the next level, and allowing for deeper research into more developed projects,” says Richard J. Geswell, President of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America. “This is the first time the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation has ever transformed a project from being self-contained to a collaborative effort—a model for future interdisciplinary research.”

In addition, The Leona M. & Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust is fully supporting 13 critically important research projects, from 12 institutions across the U.S. and Israel, which will address scientifically relevant questions in the areas of immunology, inflammation, microbiology and microbial antigens, signals and signal transduction, host defense, biochemistry, gene expression, carcinogenesis, infection, mucosal immunity, and oral tolerance.

Last year, The Trust awarded a grant of $5.6 million in support of the Foundation’s Research Training Awards Programs funding research fellowship and career development awards. The Foundation offers awards to individuals seeking to develop careers in basic and/or clinical Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis investigation. Through these awards, investigators are trained to become expert researchers in this field and often go onto receive senior awards from CCFA and the National Institutes of Health.

“By funding the next generation of researchers at the same time as we continue to fund research already underway, we are planting a seed for future discoveries,” says Geswell. “It is our hope that this research leads to better therapies and ultimately a cure.”