Abstract
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) is a term for autoimmune diseases that are mainly divided into two types—Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). Crohn’s disease can affect any part of the gastrointestinal tract, especially the terminal ileum, while ulcerative colitis only occurs in the colon and rectum. However, both CD and UC can have extra-intestinal manifestations such as eye problems and arthritis. Mesalazine is an efficient treatment for UC, while antibiotics have a better effect on Crohn’s disease. IBD affects a large number of people around the world - over 4 million people in Europe as and the United States. And the incidence among children and teenagers is even higher. Additionally, IBD is more likely to occur in industrializing countries like India and China. A survey conducted by Ray, G shows that IBD is an emerging problem in India and UC is becoming more severe and widespread.
In order to treat the IBD disease, people have tried different methods. In the past, most active pharmaceutical ingredients were small molecules. However, with the development of biological technology, nowadays there are a number of medicines that are composed of biological macromolecules. Such drugs are often more specific in targeting, with less side-effects, and are more amenable for improvement.
There are still some disadvantages of biological medicines. Usually, it is hard to mass-produce them, and they usually cannot be stored for a long time. Thus, although such medicines are efficient, they often cost too much for most patients and inapplicable in real life. But there are ways to deal with it, like increasing the production to a larger quantity to make it worth be provided with special transporting methods.
Back to the research level of detecting gut inflammation. In previous researches, it is very hard to detect molecules that can indicate gut inflammation, like H2S, mainly because the environment is too complicated and it is too difficult to simulate intestinal environment. Thus, previous scientists are facing mainly two problems: first, making bacterial strains to sense easily distinguishable metabolites produced in the gut, and second, developing methods to assay reporters’ gene expressions from those strains in animals with an intact microbiota. Then, we found that thiosulfate and tetrathionate are two ideal targets in studying gut inflammation (Kristina N-M Daeffler, 2017). In order to solve the second issue, we decided to express the detection result by showing a different color. Thus, we are then able to detect and gut inflammation.
