Intestinal strictures taken from a Crohn’s disease patient show HIF-1α activation in red and macrophages in green.
Credit: Ju-Hyun Ahn, Arthur lab
A strain of E. coli linked to Crohn’s disease produces a compound that triggers intestinal scarring, revealing a potential treatment path.
Scarring of the digestive tract is a particularly dangerous complication of Crohn’s disease (CD), a subtype of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that has no cure (1). This intestinal fibrosis often leads to intestinal narrowing, which requires emergency surgery (2). But what causes the inflammation and fibrosis in the first place remains unclear.
“We’re not really treating the root cause of the inflammation in CD. We’re treating the symptoms,” said Brian Coombes, a biochemist at McMaster University. “To get to the cause, we need…