Searching for TRans-eQTL affecting the risk to develop Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Inflammatory Bowel Disease, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, now afflict close to 1/250 individuals in industrialized societies. There is a pressing need for effective preventive means as well as curative drugs. Cis-eQTL analyses are uncovering a growing list of genes that are perturbed by IBD risk variants detected by GWAS, constituting a list of prime drug targets for the pharmaceutical industry. Cis-eQTL effects trigger downstream effects – both within the same (intracellular) and other cell types (intercellular) – that culminate in disease declaration. Some of these downstream effects are accompanied by changes in transcript levels referred to as trans-eQTL effects. The aim of the TRIQ project is to take advantage of the CEDAR-II dataset – transcriptome data for up to 400 individuals in > 75 IBD-relevant cell types – to identify trans-eQTL effects that mediate IBD predisposition. The genes that are perturbed by these trans-effect will include druggable targets that constitute prime targets for the development of new IBD therapies.