Gut Microbes. 2023 Dec;15(2):2287073. doi: 10.1080/19490976.2023.2287073.Epub 2023 Dec 3.

Susanna Meade ^1 2, Jeremy Liu Chen Kiow ^1 2, Cristian Massaro ^3 4, Gurpreet Kaur ^2 3, Elizabeth Squirell ^1 2, Brian Bressler ^1 2, Genelle Lunken ^2 3 4

Author information

¹Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

²IBD Centre of BC, Vancouver, Canada.

³Department of Pediatrics, Univerisity of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Abstract

Loss of response to therapy in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has led to a surge in research focusing on precision medicine. Three systematic reviews have been published investigating the associations between gut microbiota and disease activity or IBD therapy. We performed a systematic review to investigate the microbiome predictors of response to advanced therapy in IBD. Unlike previous studies, our review focused on predictors of response to therapy; so the included studies assessed microbiome predictors before the proposed time of response or remission. We also provide an update of the available data on mycobiomes and viromes. We highlight key themes in the literature that may serve as future biomarkers of treatment response: the abundance of fecal SCFA-producing bacteria and opportunistic bacteria, metabolic pathways related to butyrate synthesis, and non-butyrate metabolomic predictors, including bile acids (BAs), amino acids, and lipids, as well as mycobiome predictors of response.