MS Guide

Project summary

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are chronic relapsing inflammatory disorders of the gastrointestinal tract affecting 2.5 Mil. Patients in Europe alone. The majority of newly diagnosed patients are in adolescence or early adulthood and in the midst of their family life, career, and social development. Though not life-threatening, the disease comes with significant morbidity and complex treatment strategies and is associated with a high social burden and medical costs. msGUIDE aims to revolutionize IBD treatment by offering high-performance insight into local drug distribution and concentrations that can lead personalized medicine in IBD patients and

early drug development through identifying specific targeted cells of drugs, elucidating the individual phenotype and thereby patient stratification. This will be achieved by reinvigorating endoscopy to overcome major challenges for medical application. The goal of msGUIDE is to develop a highly sensitive novel imaging technology consisting of a Near-Infrared Fluorescence and Reflectance Multispectral Imaging (NIR-FRMI) unit integrated into a never before seen High-definition White Light Endoscope (HDWLE). The aim is to quantify drug distribution and concentration and identify the individual drug target cells in the gut. With this groundbreaking system we offer an operatorindependent endoscopic method to establish the optimal dose and to monitor the treatment response in IBD patients in realtime. This will allow for an individual, precise and quantitative diagnosis leading to a more personalized, targeted and thus more effective treatment in IBD and common diseases in general.

The project will initiate a radically new future technology to gain for the first time insight into local drug distribution and concentration at the target level (for msGUIDE it is the inflamed colon mucosa), since this is the important missing piece to guide personalized therapy and future drug development, and which could even predict patients’ response to selected drugs. We will achieve, for the first time, drug visualization and quantification at the target level in IBD patients by introducing and clinically validating a groundbreaking front-viewing non-contact dual sensor endoscope, combining HD-WLE with multispectral excitation-based FME and MDSFR/SFF spectroscopy to image two specific NIR tracers at different wavelengths simultaneously in IBD patients. Secondly, exploitation of the results is expected to have a strong impact on the growth of the European diagnostic sector, speed and cost of pharmaceutical industry, employment, and industrial competitiveness, especially on the consortium SME, thus securing and reinforcing industrial leadership