Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, two of the most debilitating and difficult to manage chronic gastrointestinal disorders, are associated with lifelong morbidity, greater medical attention, and diminished quality of life. They also have significant negative social and financial consequences for patients. Although anti-tumor necrosis factor drugs are among the most effective medications for IBD and noteworthy new drugs such as selective JAK inhibitors are in pipeline, currently available drugs do not work for all patients and there is no cure for IBD. There is an unmet need to decipher the etiology of IBD using animal models, which might lead to novel therapeutic strategies. While no animal models fully recapitulate human IBD phenotype and symptoms, evidence from my lab and the literature shows that some rodent models do recapitulate some common extra-intestinal manifestations and continue to give new insights into the pathogenesis of IBD. The need to obtain colonic tissue for the pathological examination and diagnosis necessitates the sacrifice of animals for the conventional investigational models of murine colitis. Murine colonoscopy has become a safe and feasible technique, allowing investigators to monitor the disease progression and the response of the murine colon to experimental interventions by taking serial mucosal biopsies of the same animal.

This Methods Collection will cover the most widely used preclinical mouse models with spontaneous or inducible colitis, state-of-the-art techniques for disease assessment and mechanistic elucidation, and some novel preclinical trials of IBD, such as fecal microbiota transplantation, which could assume a complementary role in the standard treatment of IBD.