Culturing ''mini-guts'' from stem cells to treat Crohn's disease has potential to cure the disease in some patients, University of Otago physiology research student Safina Gadeock says.
Miss Gadeock (28) will present her Dunedin-based research today in Rotorua at a gastroenterology conference.
Using stem cells from colonoscopies, Miss Gadeock and her team culture the mini-guts - tiny bowels that take 15 days to mature.
Up to 3000 can be cultured from each biopsy.
They are derived from patients with Crohn's as well as those without Crohn's.
Affecting up to 7000 New Zealanders, Crohn's is characterised by swelling, thickening and inflammation of one or more parts of the gastrointestinal tract from the mouth to the anus.
The research could prepare the groundwork for patients to be treated with their own mini-guts to act as a repair agent, depending on whether their disease was caused by genetic or environmental factors.
This had been shown to work in mice.
''So in the future when you want to use these mini-guts, you can take their own mini-guts from these patients and put it back into them and see if that repairs it.''
Miss Gadeock aims to identify the genotypes of the 163 mutations that cause Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.
''We want to be able to say this particular mutation is the reason why the patient's colon cannot recover.
''So that's going to be a big breakthrough.''
The role and function of the inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract is not understood.
''The main thing about Crohn's is people have not been able to understand the fundamental basis of disease.''
The research involves introducing inflammation to the mini-guts to see how they react to inflammation, in an effort to learn about the ''repair mechanism'' of patients with Crohn's and how it differs from the control group.
Miss Gadeock said while mini-guts had been cultured before, in Europe, no other researcher as far as she knew had studied their potential to treat Crohn's.
