Project Portugal 2030

Summary

Ulcerative colitis (UC), as a chronic IBD, has become one of the most prevalent intestinal diseases worldwide with no cure available, causing significant morbidity which severely affects quality of life and pose financial burdens for patients and governments. Despite advancements in pharmacological UC therapy, the main treatment approaches for mild-to-moderate cases are pharmacological and fail in 20% of patients and progress to severe illness resulting in surgical bowel resection. So, it urgent to find a more effective and long-term solution for earlier-stage UC.[1] In this sense, Hydrogels (without cells) have been increasingly explored for the localized treatment of UC, however, traditional hydrogels tend to have non-specific tissue distribution and poor colon retention. To overcome these, GelCoat@IBD targets to pioneer a fully human bioactive adhesive for controlling colon inflammation and promoting rapid mucosal bowel regeneration with fewer painful procedures, integrating a) dHPc proteins functionalized with NB-moieties; b) Injectable, on-demand adhesive and stable human-derived hydrogel and c) hMSCs, as precursors and recruiters of epithelial cells (Figure 1). Our ready-to-adhere dHPc-NB adhesive hydrogel will be easy to apply during a routine colonoscopy procedure with no need for other more painful, expensive, and recurrent procedures. GelCoat@IBD is a multidisciplinary proposal combining materials chemistry, biology, and engineering sciences, capable of achieve significant progress towards high-efficiency, stable, humanized, and cost-effective technology for earlier-stage UC treatment. Despite of its main goal, GelCoat@IBD project outcomes are set to make break-through advances in the state-of-art in terms of a) use an unexplored resource, dHP, as a powerful template for developing new cytocompatible biomaterials; b) improve synthetic strategies for producing novel and advanced biomaterials, gathering native biocompatibility, bioactivity and on-demand tissue adhesiveness cues for the materials; c) conducting in vitro assays using sustainable bioresources. In this project, besides regular hydrogel characterization (mechanical, physicochemical and biological), inflammatory response profile will be also studied, since this is the main disorder that characterized UC condition which may reveal interesting results for further bowel diseases studies. GelCoat@IBD will produce a) high quality and visibility results, which is very important for the scientific community, especially for the strategic research areas based in Organic and Materials Chemistry, Biomedical and Biomimetic Materials and b) huge innovation which may lead to a new CICECO research line in medium/long term period for adaptable/dynamic hydrogels based on human proteins study. The development of dHPc-NB adhesive hydrogel will not end at localized UC treatment but could also open a window to innovative drug delivery devices or disease study models for many other human health conditions. Moreover, this will greatly reduce its socioeconomic burden for both patients and governments.