Raja Atreya wins award for novel diagnostic method to predict treatment outcomes in Crohn's disease

Professor Raja Atreya from Medical Clinic 1 of the Erlangen University Hospital has won the 60,000€ Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for Young Researchers for 2015. With his innovative diagnostic method, physicians can predict the clinical response of an expensive treatment of Crohn's disease which is associated with potential side effects. Treatment with TNF antagonists is effective in only half the patients. The other patients bear the risks of side effects without any clinical benefits of the therapy. With the award, the Scientific Council of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation acknowledges the avenues that the novel diagnostic opens up for personalized medicine in Crohn's disease. The award will be presented by Professor Harald zur Hausen in the Paulskirche, Frankfurt.

Crohn's disease is a highly debilitating, chronic-inflammatory bowel disease. Constant diarrhea and abdominal cramps make it difficult to live a normal life. Therapies that target proinflammatory mediators in Crohn's disease have been available for some years. Some involve TNF antagonists which are therapeutic antibodies that neutralize the molecular messenger TNF. This messenger is implicated as a major factor perpetuating the disease. Since only half the patients benefit from the treatment, medical science has long been seeking a way of predicting the success of this therapy. The prize-winner has closed this gap with his research. Atreya was guided by the idea that only those medicines are effective that actually find their target. To help this process along, the prize-winner developed a novel antibody spray that makes the target molecules necessary for the success of treatment visible in endoscopic imaging prior to therapy. In a clinical trial with 25 Crohn's disease patients, he succeeded in demonstrating that patients who have a large number of target molecules for a TNF antagonist in their bowel mucosa respond better to the subsequent therapy than do patients with few target molecules. The success of this approach was underscored by a number of other factors: fewer additional medicines had to be prescribed, the intestinal mucosa healed within a year, and patients did not require surgery for complications during the trial period. The Young Researcher prize-winner and his co-workers now plan to test the new diagnostic in large-scale trials.