The Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Unit combines clinicians and investigators from the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona with researchers at IDIBAPS and serves the metropolitan area of Barcelona, Spain. The IBD Unit is a major referral center for IBD care and researches both within Spain and abroad.

The IBD Unit concentrates its research activities on aspects of pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment of IBD. Specifically, our focus is on discovering mechanisms bearing direct therapeutic implications. Thus, projects are directed toward the characterization of differential patterns of immune response in early and late Crohn’s Disease (CD), which may lead to personalized treatment options based on immune characteristics, and on the identification of molecular factors that maintain remission in these inflammatory disorders. In the area of diagnostics, the group is heading initiatives on the use of magnetic resonance imaging for the evaluation of inflammatory lesions in the intestine. In the area of therapeutics, the main focus of the group is the development of innovative forms of cell therapies for human IBD, including the use of hematopoietic stem cells, tolerogenic dendritic cells, and epithelial stem cells.

Our research group possesses the know-how for characterizing the mechanistic aspects of drug response in humans and experimental models of IBD, using a variety of approaches including gene expression microarray studies, bulk, and single-cell RNA sequencing studies, tissue and cell cultures, flow cytometry, cell-labeled magnetic resonance studies, conventional endoscopy, and endomicroscopy. Moreover, our group has developed the methodology for producing clinical-grade cell products, such as those based on various types of immune cells, for treating IBD patients.

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