In 2024, the GI Research Foundation Awards $600,000 for Novel Research Projects Led by Investigators at the University of Chicago
Millions of people in the United States are suffering from digestive diseases and cancers. Supporting innovative research to discover better treatments, prevention pathways, and cures is core to the GastroIntestinal (GI) Research Foundation’s mission.
Providing early “seed” money to bold ideas allows our funded scientists to take risks that could yield big rewards for patient treatment and outcomes. These early investments often position our funded researchers to receive significant grant awards from more traditional funding sources like the National Institutes of Health which requires proof of concept before they can fund.
Click on each award to learn more about the problem the research will address, the hypothesis, the research plan, and the goals of improved patient care and outcomes.
Research on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) – Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis – and its complications received five of eight awards.
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- Examination of Gut Mucosal Populations and Dynamics During Region-specific Microbiota Transplants that Drive Persistent, Off-target Consequences to the Host/Orlando DeLeon, PhD
- Building Experimental Tools to Assess the Gut Microbiome’s Effects on Gastrointestinal Regeneration/ Cambrian Liu, PhD
- Evaluating the Incidence of and Treatments for Peristomal Pyoderma Gangrenosum/ Kinga S. Olortegui, MD, MS, FACS and Marita Kametas, MSN, APN, FNP-BC, CMSRN, COCN
- Stop-Uc: De-Escalation of Therapy In Patients With Ulcerative Colitis With Histological Normalization And Rescue Through Autologous Fecal Microbiota Transplant/ David T. Rubin, MD and Joëlle St-Pierre, MD PhD
- Understanding Colon-Specific Regulatory T Cells and their Cellular Crosstalk in Ulcerative Colitis/ David Zemmour, MD, PhD
One unique aspect of the GI Research Foundation is its funding of research on a broad range of digestive diseases, including pancreatic cancer and liver diseases. Three awards support research in these areas.
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- DNA Methylation as a Biomarker of Ulcerative Colitis Dysplasia in Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC)/ Marc Bissonnette, MD
- Pancreatic Cancer Outcomes: The Role of Social Determinants of Health in an Urban Cohort/ Bradford Chong, MD
- Characterization of Novel Bile Acids in Patients with Liver Disease/ Matthew Odenwald, MD PhD