Weekend roundup from Atomic IBD
IBD Edinburgh 2022 Agenda, Crohn's disease treatment, COVID updates
Welcome to another edition of ATOMIC IBD, where I am looking to build deep community for:
the tens of millions affected by Crohn’s disease and UC across the world
the healthcare professionals working tirelessly every day to look after patients with IBD
the research community striving to improve outcomes for IBD patients
pharmaceutical industry and biotech partners who are making new therapies for IBD their top priority
the patient organisations and funders raising awareness and fighting for better resources and a greater voice for our community
Today’s weekend roundup contains:
a first look at the agenda for IBD Edinburgh 2022 - you will not want to miss this fully hybrid event “Holistic Remission : from Bench to Bedside”
a thread on Crohn’s disease treatment principles and mucosal healing
recording from my lecture to the 1st BRICS IBD symposium held virtually from Shanghai last weekend
a brief update on the COVID situation globally (European winter wave, boosters, Omicron variant, latest CLARITY data)
IBD Edinburgh 2022 - first look at the agenda
Holistic Remission : from Bench to Bedside
Join us on Thursday 13th January 2022 in person at Edinburgh International Conference Centre or virtually for a full hybrid IBD meeting.
Registration will open on Monday (the link will follow).
You will not want to miss this event designed for healthcare professionals in IBD.
I have co-created this agenda with Professors Ailsa Hart (St Mark’s) and Tim Raine (Cambridge) to bring you a fresh, forward looking and cutting edge agenda covering:
Predicting and preventing IBD - featuring Professor Tine Jess from Copenhagen who is director of the new PREDICT IBD center in Copenhagen
Stride(IN)2 holistic remission - where we will review STRIDE-2 focus on Pain with an important patient perspective, Resilience and IBD (from Laurie Keefer who is leading the world on this with GRITT-IBD and Trellus Health) and a topic very often neglected - Sex and IBD
Innovations in IBD - featuring Professor Kevin Whelan talking about Diet and IBD
Fireside chat with cases (this will be a very practical session with learnings to take directly back to your IBD clinics)
Keynote lecture on COVID and IBD from Tariq Ahmad (chief investigator of CLARITY) and Nick Powell (chief investigator of VIP)
I’m really excited about our faculty - world-renowned IBD experts and some seriously talented rising starts - all coming together for one day.
There will be more to come: additional content from surprise guests for our virtual audience to enjoy during the breaks and for everyone to learn from afterwards.
This event will be free to attend (in person or virtually).
Crohn’s disease treatment principles and mucosal healing
Last weekend I was honoured to deliver three lectures to the 1st Annual BRICS IBD Symposium bringing together clinicians and academics from Brazil - Russia - India - China and South Africa. The meeting was originally scheduled to be face-to-face in Shanghai but delayed twice by the pandemic - finally going ahead as a virtual event.
All talks were pre-recorded; this is great for two reasons.
Given time difference I did not have to lecture at 250am and 450am last Saturday morning - I am grateful for that but sorry to miss the ‘live’ experience.
The talks are all ready to share to a wider audience.
Earlier this week I used the visual content from this talk to generate a master graphical thread (n= 28 tweets). Click below to read.
A brief update on COVID and IBD
The pandemic has surged back to the front pages this past week.
There is a substantial winter wave across much of Europe
There is increasingly good evidence that the boosters work very well
This thread from John Burn-Murdoch during the week is highly informative with superb data visualisation. He covers the winter wave across Europe and the increasingly good evidence that the boosters work very well.
The Omicron variant is a cause for concern but not panic
There is a lot of concern about the potential impact of the new Omicron variant. It is of some interest that this may have developed from a long evolution in a severely immunocompromised host.
We will learn more about Omicron in the coming days. Cases have been found in Belgium and the UK (linked to people travelling from S Africa). The best protection right now is vaccination (1st, 2nd and 3rd doses plus boosters). The sensible expert voices I have come to trust on the pandemic are worried but not overly so.
The latest data from the CLARITY IBD study are in an updated preprint
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.10.21266168v1
I will come back with a detailed thread on this soon in which I hope to include the data from the VIP study. An excellent abstract of these data was submitted to ECCO 2022 last week. A preprint on VIP should go online in the next week or two. This includes data on ustekinumab, tofacitinib, thiopurines and infliximab.
Here are the two most important figures from the CLARITY preprint
First, the antibody decay post-vaccine in patients on infliximab (in green) versus those on vedolizumab (in orange). In patients on infliximab, anti-spike antibody levels drop below the seroconversion threshold between 14-18 weeks after the second dose of either Pfizer or AZ vaccine. Those patients on vedolizumab are no different from the healthy population.
This is the strong rationale behind 3rd primary vaccine doses in patients on anti-TNF therapy with infliximab or adalimumab. Future data from CLARITY will show the effectiveness of these added doses.
The second figure (below) shows the early vaccine effectiveness data from CLARITY. In the left hand panel you can see PCR proven infections in patients on infliximab (green) and vedolizumab (orange) prior to vaccines - there is no difference (good news!).
On the right hand panel you see PCR proven infections after vaccination - this time the lines separate. This shows that there are more breakthrough infections post-vaccination in patients on infliximab versus vedolizumab. This is in keeping with what we would have predicted from the data above. There is nothing to suggest these infections are more serious.
None of this should cause too much alarm. We know from the work we’ve done across inflammatory bowel, joint and skin diseases (IMIDs) that anti-TNF therapy is NOT associated with worse COVID outcomes (ICU admission and death).
The pre-print for that dataset done using the OpenSafety platform is here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.03.21262888v1
More to come. Please subscribe to stay uptodate. Thanks for your interest and support