Brief Description
As of now, there are no radical treatment methods for inflammatory bowel disease (“IBD”). Available treatment methods are administered with the goal of alleviating or delaying the progression of the disease as opposed to completely curing it. Medications commonly used to treat IBD have various side effects: sulfasalazine can cause vomiting, loss of appetite, rash, headache, tension, leukopenia, red blood cell abnormalities, proteinuria, and diarrhea; prednisolone can cause stomach ulcers or avascular necrosis of the femoral head after prolonged use; Infliximab, which was approved by the FDA for use in treating Crohn’s disease, can cause pancytopenia, drug-induced lupus, and reactivation of hepatitis B or tuberculosis. As such, there is still a need to develop pharmaceuticals that can be used to treat IBD that have few or no adverse side effects.
This study examined glutathione S-transferases theta 1 (“GSTT1”) proteins or compositions whose main components included genes that code for this protein. Inducing an immune response from the mucosal barrier through the phosphorylation of STAT3 and p38/JNK was highly effective in treating and preventing IBD. This study measured whether there were low levels of protein dimers of GSTT1, which regulates cellular signal transduction, thus making it a highly effective tool in predicting the onset of IBD.