In his thesis he addresses the potential utility of the microbiome as a noninvasive marker in IBD diagnostics and prognostics. Specifically differentiating IBD from symptomatic non-IBD controls, distinguishing indolent from severe disease courses, and identifying phenotypic subgroups within IBD.
The results show limited value of the microbiome as a general marker of IBD from symptomatically similar controls, since already established inflammatory markers like fecal calprotectin consistently outperformed microbiome profiles in this regard. However, there were consistent and relatively strong signals related within-IBD phenotypic characterization, with significant differences between CD and UC.
We also showed that microbiome markers are related to future disease development. Overall, this shows that the microbiome can bring significant value to future clinical workflows, both related to IBD diagnostics and prognostics, while acknowledging that our results show a variability and stochasticity which indicates that the microbiome may be unsuitable for standalone tests.
Principal supervisor Professor Johannes E. Hov says: «Simen’s thesis brings completely new and more realistic data on the true potential of microbiota profiles as clinical tools in IBD. With his projects we have also had enough samples to start implementing modern machine-learning and AI-based clustering methodology in our research projects, and Simen has prepared the ground for how to use the microbiota in IBD to help us understand PSC.»
Dr. Hansen now returns to the field of biology.