Ambition and Objectives

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are chronic inflammatory conditions (CIDs) that place significant strain on people living with these conditions and healthcare systems due to the need for long-term care. While early interventions are vital for improving outcomes for individuals affected by these diseases, the absence of reliable biomarkers or methods to identify at-risk individuals and predict flare-ups complicates prevention efforts. This gap highlights the need for more effective management strategies that support low-threshold preventive interventions, enhance the quality of life for those living with RA and IBD, and achieve full disease control as early as possible. Ultimately, personalised prevention should aim to reverse disease processes and pave the way for curative approaches.

Key Objectives

To identify actionable predictors, including biomarkers, mechanisms, and clinical features, that signal progression from pre-symptomatic to manifest disease and predict early disease relapse in RA and IBD.

To develop innovative and safe digital tools for home-based and continuous assessment of data from people living with these diseases, such as health apps and wearables that monitor dietary behaviour, movement patterns, physical activity, and sleep.

To explore how adjusting the tryptophan/kynurenine pathway – a process in the body that affects immune response and inflammation – through diet can promote better health in people with early RA and IBD in a proof-of-concept nutritional study.

To set up safe and scalable swarm-based analysis solutions (collective data processing) for multi-dimensional data sets, using Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods to develop decision support tools for use in clinical practice.

To analyse the ethical, legal, economic and communicative impacts of disease risk assessment, prevention strategies, and early accessible interventions in RA and IBD by incorporating perspectives from individuals living with these conditions and healthcare stakeholders.