The Eli & Edythe Broad L. Foundation

This study evaluates the efficacy and safety of a bilberry derived anthocyanin-rich extract in patients with ulcerative colitis. Two thirds of participants will receive the anthocyanin-rich extract, while one third will receive placebo, for 8 weeks of treatment.

Antibiotic dependent pouchitis (ADP) is predestined to benefit from FMT, since bacterial dysbiosis, which can only be controlled with antibiotics, appears to be the major driver of the clinical symptoms. This is a proof of concept randomized placebo controlled trial, in which 50% of the patients will receive FMT and 50% will receive a placebo FMT. Additionally the trial offers an open label extension period.

The human immune system is usually tolerant of the millions of beneficial commensal bacteria (the microbiome), which colonize the healthy intestinal tract. In contrast, patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) may play host to an imbalanced mix of such intestinal bacteria, which initiates abnormal immune responses in susceptible individuals. The resulting inflammation that occurs in the gastrointestinal tract damages the intestinal lining, leading to symptoms (such as intractable diarrhea, pain or weight loss), heightened cancer risk, other serious complications with substantial morbidity and even death. Current therapies for IBD focus on suppressing the excessive immune response to these bacteria, but have major side effects and do not address any role of the microbiome in disease development.
The investigators hypothesize that there is heightened intraluminal generation of pro-inflammatory factors by luminal "pathogenic" bacteria, such as extracellular nucleotides and purinergic derivatives, which trigger host immune cells. This results in loss of suppressive T regulatory cells with unrestrained immune cell deviation to pathogenic T helper cells that cause inflammatory responses. The investigators' proposal is that correcting the disease-provoking microbiome would beneficially improve gut microbial diversity, alter immune responses elicited in patients by such microbial products of pathogenic bacteria, and ultimately limit and suppress disease activity.
To test the hypothesis, the investigators propose to enroll patients with active Crohn's Disease, and introduce the microbiome of healthy and unrelated individuals to patient's intestinal tract, via fecal biotherapy (FBT) with all applicable safety measures. The investigators propose to comprehensively test the effects of FBT on the host microbiome, determine microbial production of inflammatory nucleotides and derivatives, which the investigators suggest might impact the host immune response and disease activity in patients with IBD.