Highlights
- First-of-its-kind biobank: Canada’s inaugural national surgical biobank focused on pediatric Crohn’s disease has been established, enabling access to vital tissue samples.
- Multidisciplinary collaboration: Nine pediatric surgical centers contribute to a comprehensive initiative combining surgery, gastroenterology, and clinical data collection.
- Boost to Crohn’s research: The biobank overcomes historical barriers in pediatric Crohn’s studies, enabling detailed exploration of disease mechanisms and treatment strategies.
A team at the University of Alberta has established Canada’s first national biobank dedicated to pediatric Crohn’s disease, paving the way for further research into its causes. Their multidisciplinary work has been published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery.
Dr. Paul Lerner, the study’s first author, highlights the challenges surrounding Crohn’s disease: “We don’t know what causes Crohn’s. It is not curable and not preventable. This biobank will enable groundbreaking research into Crohn’s disease and should generate critical insights into understanding and treating Crohn’s disease.” Research on pediatric Crohn’s has historically been limited due to the scarcity of surgically resected tissue, as endoscopic biopsies fail to capture crucial structures like mesenteric fat and lymph nodes.
Canada has one of the highest rates of pediatric Crohn’s disease worldwide. This rare inflammatory bowel disease affects the entire thickness of the bowel wall, leading to both short- and long-term complications, including malabsorption and malnutrition—issues that interfere with growth and development. Within a decade of diagnosis, up to 36% of affected children in Canada will require abdominal surgery. Over their lifetime, 70-90% of patients with Crohn’s undergo at least one abdominal operation.
To advance research, the team has developed a pan-Canadian surgical biobank, collecting bowel, mesenteric fat, and lymph node tissue from pediatric Crohn’s patients who undergo surgery. This marks the first national surgical biobank for pediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and is part of the broader CIDsCaNN research collaboration.
Dr. Lerner explains, “If a child undergoes bowel resection at one of the nine participating pediatric surgical centers, we receive and preserve samples of their bowel, fat, and lymph nodes for research. The patients also take part in a prospective inception cohort study, which gathers detailed clinical data—allowing us to correlate clinical risk factors with tissue analysis.”
The initiative is a joint effort between the Departments of Surgery (Drs. Troy Perry and Paul Lerner) and Pediatrics (Drs. Hien Huynh and Eytan Wine). Dr. Huynh, a pediatric gastroenterologist, emphasizes the importance of collaboration: “Without contributions from multiple disciplines, it would be impossible to prospectively collect a large number of high-quality specimens from different centers while maintaining comprehensive surgical and post-surgical data.”
Dr. Troy Perry, the principal investigator, notes, “This project will foster further multi-institutional collaborations in pediatric IBD research, bringing investigators together across Canada to explore the pathophysiology of Crohn’s disease using patient tissues.”
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