The Crohn's & Colitis Foundation of America has announced a three-year, $17.5 million grant from the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust in support of better diagnostics, treatments, and cures for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis, also known as inflammatory bowel diseases.

The grant will be used to develop an integrated knowledge platform called IBD Plexus that centralizes and aggregates patient information across multiple research efforts. IBD Plexus will include a biobank; registries to capture clinical, patient-reported, and biosample data; and a data management platform that houses, organizes, aggregates, and disseminates IBD research data. Within three years, the organization expects to have clinical information on more than forty thousand Crohn's and colitis patients, along with genomic and microbial profiles from seven thousand patients who will be followed over time. CCFA has selected Deloitte Consulting to develop IBD Plexus's big data management and analytics platform and Thermo Fisher Scientific to provide biobanking services.

"We have seen breakthrough discoveries in IBD, but progress toward identifying effective, personalized treatments and potential cures has been slow," said James Lewis, a professor of medicine and clinical epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania who led a two-year discovery and planning process to conceptualize and design the IBD Plexus platform. "There is a strong and growing demand from both the medical and patient communities for new therapies that will keep IBD in remission, better tools to help select the right therapy for the right patient, and practical ways to reduce variability in the quality of care for individual patients."

"In isolation, when not linked to each other, these various data types are of limited value in helping to increase our understanding and develop better treatments and cures for IBD," said Scott Snapper, director of Boston Children's Hospital's Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center and chair of CCFA's National Scientific Advisory Committee. "However, brought together in an organized and comprehensive way and analyzed using sophisticated bioinformatics technology, this pool of data should yield extraordinary new opportunities for IBD research as well as for patient disease management and care, and, ultimately, cures for IBD."