Mount Sinai and King Saud University Medical City in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, have announced a three-year collaboration aimed at better understanding why inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) runs in some Saudi families, and how that knowledge can lead to risk ascertainment, earlier diagnosis and more personalised treatment options.
The project will focus on Saudi families with multiple members affected by IBD, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. By identifying exposure and biological markers that drive disease mechanisms and outcomes in these high-risk families, the parties aim to accelerate the development of new diagnostics and therapies tailored to individual patients around the world.
As part of the collaboration, King Saud University Medical City will identify and enrol eligible participants and collect whole blood, serum, and stool samples, along with de-identified health and family history information, from individuals with IBD and relatives at increased risk. Mount Sinai will lead advanced biomarker discovery and integrative analyses using multi-omics profiling and other state-of-the-art research tools.
“Familial IBD is still poorly understood, even though families with several affected members can teach us a great deal about how these diseases develop,” says Jean-Frédéric Colombel MD, Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology) and Director of the Susan and Leonard Feinstein Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (pictured). “What makes this collaboration exciting is the ability to study well-characterised families alongside comprehensive molecular data. That combination is rare, and it gives us a real chance to pinpoint early signals of disease. Over time, we hope these insights will help clinicians recognise risk sooner and make more informed decisions about which treatments are likely to help.”
The collaboration is designed to enable structured sample collection, data sharing, and joint analyses, creating a unique resource of high-quality biospecimens linked with detailed clinical information and family pedigrees. By studying families particularly likely to experience the genetic, nongenetic, and biological factors that influence IBD, the project aims to inform the development of next-generation diagnostic tools and therapies. If successful, the findings could help clinicians identify at-risk individuals sooner, stratify risk in high-burden families, and tailor treatments with greater precision.
“Familial IBD gives us a rare opportunity to study the immune system in a context where genetics and environment are clearly interacting,” says Miriam Merad, MD, PhD, Chair of Immunology and Immunotherapy and Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “When several people in the same family are affected, we can follow how immune signals shift over time and begin to understand why some relatives develop disease while others do not. The combination of high-quality samples and detailed clinical histories will allow us to map those immune changes with much more clarity. That knowledge is critical if we want to build diagnostics or treatments that truly meet patients where they are, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all model of care.”