This is a 60-minute webinar for practicing Canadian gastroenterologists on the emerging immune mechanisms under investigation in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The format is 45 minutes of didactic content with embedded audience polling, followed by 15 minutes of moderated discussion.
The scope spans the potential treatment pathways for IBD management. Because the agents discussed are pre-NOC and investigational in Canada, the program is built and delivered as non-promotional disease-state and pathway education, anchored in biology rather than in any single product or development program.
Three disease-state gaps frame the content. First, a therapeutic efficacy ceiling persists despite an expanded armamentarium (anti-TNF, anti-integrin, anti–IL12/23 and IL23p19, JAK inhibitors, S1P modulators), with a substantial proportion of patients failing to achieve or sustain remission on any single agent. Second, intestinal fibrosis drives stricturing disease and surgery in Crohn disease and is under-recognized in ulcerative colitis, yet there is no approved anti-fibrotic therapy, no consensus definition of fibrosis and no validated endpoint, which makes measurement itself a bottleneck. Third, precision medicine in IBD has advanced slowly since infliximab, and no biomarker-guided approach to therapy selection has entered routine Canadian practice.
Two further gaps shape how the material is handled. The biology of these newer mechanisms is unfamiliar to many clinicians and is frequently and incorrectly conflated with established targets because of shared superfamily nomenclature, most notably TL1A with anti-TNF therapy. The time required to move a mechanism from gene discovery to clinic is also poorly appreciated. The roughly two-decade TL1A arc, contrasted with a differently shaped program such as miR-124.
This program has received an unrestricted educational grant or in-kind support from Merck Canada.