Clinical Trials for Crohn’s Disease

NIDDK conducts and supports clinical trials in many diseases and conditions, including digestive diseases. The trials look to find new ways to prevent, detect, or treat disease and improve quality of life.

What are clinical trials for Crohn’s disease?

Clinical trials—and other types of clinical studies—are part of medical research and involve people like you. When you volunteer to take part in a clinical study, you help doctors and researchers learn more about disease and improve health care for people in the future.

Researchers are studying many aspects of Crohn’s disease and other types of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as

• diet and the microbiome’s effect on Crohn’s disease
• genes that are associated with IBD in African Americans
• the immune system and how it controls inflammation in the digestive tract in people with IBD
• new treatments for Crohn’s disease

Find out if clinical studies are right for you.

Watch a video of NIDDK Director Dr. Griffin P. Rodgers explaining the importance of participating in clinical trials.

What clinical studies for Crohn’s disease are looking for participants?

You can view a filtered list of clinical studies on Crohn’s disease that are federally funded, open, and recruiting at ClinicalTrials.gov. You can expand or narrow the list to include clinical studies from industry, universities, and individuals; however, the National Institutes of Health does not review these studies and cannot ensure they are safe for you. Always talk with your health care provider before you participate in a clinical study.

What have we learned about Crohn’s disease from NIDDK-funded research?

NIDDK has supported many research projects to learn more about Crohn’s disease and other types of IBD. NIDDK-supported research efforts include

• the IBD Genetics Consortium (IBDGC), established in 2002 to identify genes that make some people more likely to develop IBD. The IBDGC, in collaboration with the International IBD Genetics Consortium, has enrolled thousands of people with IBD and identified about 200 regions of the human genome that are associated with the risk of IBD.
• studies through the NIH Integrative Human Microbiome Project, which have examined the relationship between the microbiome and IBD.