The Nordic IBD treatment strategy trial (NORDTREAT)

Purpose and goal

By implementing a cross-disciplinary collaboration, NORDTREAT will take advantage of recent progress in omics profiling of IBD to: 1)Implement a personalised medicine-based treatment strategy trial, built on a novel serum protein signature, which will allow us to stratify newly diagnosed patients by future disease course. 2)Improve IBD patients’ quality of life and treatment outcome, by identifying and treating high-risk patients according to a top-down algorithm. 3)Develop an exploitation plan focusing on the development of the signature into a diagnostic application.

Expected results and effects

The NORDTREAT will benefit and create value by: Implementing personalised medicine in IBD and identifying high-risk patients, whom should be assigned to a top-down strategy. Improving quality of life among patients. Exploring the results in collaboration with Nordic biomedical sector. Disseminate results that ultimately may reduce health care utilization. Establishing a cross-disciplinary collaborative network across the Nordic countries. Providing valuable information on various aspects of responsiveness to anti-TNF to academia and the pharmaceutical industry.

Planned approach and implementation

NORDTREAT will stratify newly diagnosed IBD patients into high-risk or low-risk, with respect to future disease course, based on a novel serum protein-signature. Patients at high risk of poor disease course will be treated according to a top-down approach with an anti-TNF agent. Outcomes at 1 year will be assessed and compared with a recent Norwegian high-risk profile cohort, who have been treated according to current clinical management. In parallel, potential additional novel biomarkers will be explored in collaboration with the Nordic biomedical industrial sector.