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A careful integration of the effectiveness and safety of the therapies for inflammatory bowel disease, considering patients’ disease risks, treatment complications and preferences, is warranted to inform the positioning of therapies in clinical practice. Precision medicine might help choose the best option for an individual patient.
In a study published in Nature, new data have highlighted the bacterial strain-level sharing rates of mother–offspring pairs, twins, families, cohabiting individuals and individuals within a population, as well as those between different populations, providing a comprehensive view of the transmission landscape of the intestinal and oral microbiome in humans. These findings highlight the need to reassess diseases currently considered to be non-communicable and underscore the importance of considering social structure and transmissibility in the design of microbial studies.
Increased intestinal permeability owing to tight junction barrier loss could be targeted in gastrointestinal diseases associated with increased permeability. In this Review, the authors discuss the molecular components and regulation of the tight junction, and consider the relevance to gut diseases and therapeutic opportunities.
IL-12 and IL-23 have been implicated in inflammatory bowel disease. In this Review, Vande Casteele and colleagues summarize the mechanistic role of IL-12 and IL-23 in inflammatory bowel disease, and discuss the clinical development of drugs targeting IL-12 and/or IL-23.
In this Review, Pabst and colleagues discuss the gut–liver axis, with an emphasis on the establishment and regulation of structural and functional barriers, dynamics within the axis (immune responses and microbiome) and clinical implications.
Preclinical research is required to improve our understanding of cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). In this Consensus Statement, a task force of experts provides recommendations on the criteria for preclinical models of CCA to increase disease understanding and help to develop novel therapeutic approaches.
