Our research strategy

People living with digestive conditions often go through a long and complicated process before they get a diagnosis for their illness. We need to find new tests to speed up and improve diagnosis and monitoring, so we can intervene earlier with tailored treatments that reduce the risk of complications. We also want to understand the causes and triggers for digestive conditions and symptoms, so we can prevent or delay them.

We will:

• Aim to make diagnosis and monitoring more effective and less invasive, by finding new tests and improving current techniques such as endoscopy.
• Learn how to differentiate digestive conditions from each other and identify subtypes of disease, so patients can receive tailored treatments.
• Understand the causes and triggers for digestive conditions, so we can prevent them from developing or slow their progression.

We urgently need new treatments for people living with digestive conditions, so we can reduce serious illness and improve survival. Our focus will be on innovative treatments that take advantage of the knowledge research is revealing about our guts. We will help create treatments that target the causes of different types of digestive illness and can be personalised for the individual needs of patients.

We will:

• Find out how to target key underlying mechanisms in digestive conditions, such as interaction between the gut and brain, immune responses and bacterial imbalance.
• Help discover innovative new treatments for gut conditions, such as gene therapies, and ways of better controlling the immune system, inflammation and the microbiome.
• Develop treatments to repair damaged guts and improve survival, including surgery to prevent or manage complications, and improve urgent care for those with serious illness.

We want to ensure everyone living with a digestive condition has the best possible quality of life. That involves doing research to improve current treatments and models of care, to help manage symptoms and flare-ups. We want to give people better control of their conditions and understand factors that might impact their wellbeing.

We will:

• Find better ways of managing the symptoms of digestive conditions that impact everyday life.
• Help people living with digestive conditions to manage their health, by generating evidence on diet, exercise, and over-the-counter treatments.
• Support the mental health of people with digestive conditions and understand how this can affect their gut symptoms.

All our research is centred on the needs and priorities of our community – people living with, or affected by, digestive conditions. We have collaborated with our community to develop this strategy and will continue to do so as we put it into action. We will understand what matters most to our community through priority setting partnerships and involving our dedicated ‘Experts by Experience’ panel in reviewing funding applications and new research initiatives. We will work hard to reach a diverse range of people living with and affected by digestive conditions, including those from under-served groups, and will support our researchers to ensure their studies meaningfully involve the community.

At Guts UK, we are passionate about supporting the most talented researchers early in their careers so they can become the next leaders in digestive health. We want to nurture a vibrant and diverse research community. Under our strategy, we will be directing funding at researchers who are building their careers in digestive health, through student prizes, fellowships and development awards. We will support the most promising researchers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines to develop into leaders of their field and draw in talented people with expertise in areas such as data science and healthcare research.

We think we can make the biggest difference for people living with digestive conditions by funding really innovative science at an early stage to help get it off the ground. We plan to focus much of our funding on small, scientifically exciting proof of concept studies. By their nature these will be high risk, but the most successful could be game-changing. Our funding will help researchers generate the data they need to win larger follow-on grants – attracting money into the field and amplifying our impact for people with gut conditions.

If we’re going to grow our impact for people living with digestive conditions, it’s vital that we work with partners to pool expertise and draw more money into gut research. We already have strong relationships with the gut research community, working in partnership with the British Society of Gastroenterology and other specialist groups, and involving many of their experts on our research committees. We next aim to grow our number of partnerships with charities and other funders – partnering with organisations that have a shared interest either in specific gut conditions or in the underlying science. Working in partnership will allow us to draw on innovations and expertise from the digestive health field and beyond, and to expand the research we are able to support on behalf of our community.