Edouard Louis © ECCO

The BIOCYCLE project has now been ongoing for almost 2.5 years. This project, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, aims at exploring different aspects of the question of treatment de-escalation in moderate-severe Crohn’s Disease, first requiring a combination therapy with anti-TNF and antimetabolites to control the disease. Once the disease has been stabilised, an unsolved question is to whether it is possible to de-escalate therapy. This question is important for several reasons including safety, tolerance, quality of life or costs to name the most prominent. 

Dear friends and colleagues,

UR-CARE is online NOW!

This international database offered to you by ECCO’s research unit (IBDIM) has been designed for your patient records and your research studies.

Laurent Peyrin-Biroulet © ECCO

I am happy to inform all ECCO members that the Governing Board started working while everybody was still on the plane! This year, we arrived on Friday afternoon and could already discuss numerous points. First, it was decided to continue increasing the amount of money for grants to foster exchange across ECCO centres and support innovative scientific projects. 

The 13^th Congress of ECCO in Vienna is coming closer and so is the late registration deadline. Benefit from the late registration fee by registering up until January 31, 2018 (after this date the onsite registration fees will apply).

Julián Panés  ©  ECCO

Dear ECCO friends,

We are witnessing an exciting period in the development of new therapies for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. New therapeutic targets, and new classes of drugs, are being integrated into our therapeutic armamentarium. However, when we consider the proportion of patients who respond to induction therapy and, among those, the fraction who achieve remission during maintenance, the percentage of initially treated patients in whom the disease is satisfactorily controlled over one year does not exceed 15%–30%.