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The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Established in 1968, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is one of the leading medical schools in the United States. The Icahn School of Medicine is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service. It has more than 3,400 faculty members in 32 departments and 14 research institutes and ranks among the top 20 medical schools by U.S News & World Report. Dr. Jean-Frederic Colombel has over 800 publications in clinical trials in IBD.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the faculty of medicine and graduate medical school of Harvard University. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consistently ranked first for research among medical schools by U.S. News & World Report. Unlike most other leading medical schools, HMS does not operate in conjunction with a single hospital but is directly affiliated with several teaching hospitals in the Boston area.

Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) is an international leader in virtually every area of medicine and has been the site of pioneering breakthroughs that have improved lives around the world. A major teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, BWH has a legacy of excellence that continues to grow year after year. BWH includes 150 outpatient practices with over 1,200 physicians.

UC San Diego Health has made landmark achievements in medical therapy and minimally invasive surgical techniques to achieve remission of symptoms in people with IBD. Led by Dr. Bill Sandborn, M.D., the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center unites the expertise of gastroenterologists, radiologists, nutritional health experts, surgeons and digestive disease physician-scientists to deliver comprehensive, innovative care. Dr. Sandborn has over 600 publications in clinical trials in CD and UC.

The Multiple Sclerosis Center at Johns Hopkins is one of the largest clinical and research MS centers in the world. With ten neurologists, two nurses, and extensive laboratory and support staff, the JHMSC is an industry leader from diagnosis and clinical care to cutting edge clinical trials in brain imaging and laboratory research in the field of MS. Peter Calabresi, M.D., Director of the Johns Hopkins Multiple Sclerosis Center, was selected as a winner of the 2015 Barancik Prize for Innovation in MS research and was recently elected to the Association of American Physicians.

UNC Chapel Hill Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology performs more than 45,000 GI procedures and clinic visits annually and its clinicians are ranked in the top 1% of all university healthcare consortium clinics. With over $23 million in research funding and over 250 papers in scientific journals annually, the Division is a national leader in research in gastrointestinal and liver diseases. The Division serves as the clinical home for the Center for Gastrointestinal Biology and Disease, one of 17 federally funded centers focusing on research in GI diseases. UNC is one of 39 institutions in the U.S. to receive a Clinical & Translational Science Award (CTSA).

Alimentiv (previously Robarts Clinical Trials) is a GI focused specialty Contract Research Organization (CRO), which provides a broad range of clinical research services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and academic investigators. Robarts has developed a proprietary Central Image Management Solution (CIMS) that facilitates central review of complex medical images. CIMS is an integrated hardware/software/service solution that facilitates endoscopic procedure video acquisition, processing, publishing and the secure sharing of videos to support central review. Robart’s CIMS work has involved over 2000 sites across 50 countries requiring the processing of greater than 25,000 endoscopic video recordings from Australia, Europe, North America, South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.

The Case Western Reserve University Digestive Health Research Institute (DHRI) was established on July 1, 2015, under the leadership of Inaugural Director Fabio Cominelli, M.D., Ph.D. The DHRI houses a robust organizational infrastructure capable of supporting and promoting interdisciplinary basic-science, translational and clinical research. Dr. Cominelli is the Director of the NIH-funded Center for Excellence in Digestive Diseases.

University at Buffalo houses two New York State Centers of Excellence (out of the total 11), Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences (CBLS), and Center of excellence in Materials Informatics (CMI). Boasting over 4,000 clinicians and scientists, emphasis has been placed on developing advanced biomedical and engineering disciplines. Dr. Barry Smith is a SUNY Distinguished Professor and Director of the National Center for Ontological Research at the University at Buffalo. He is also Affiliate Professor in the UB
Departments of Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and Neurology.

The Colorado State University School of Biomedical Engineering (SBME) provides transdisciplinary education, research, and practical experiences throughout a full range of degree programs. The unique structure of the School involves four colleges, 14 departments, and over 70 faculty. Academic excellence across diverse fields converges into three primary areas of research: (1) regenerative and rehabilitative medicine, (2) imaging and diagnostics, and (3) medical devices and therapeutics. Bruno Sobral, Ph.D., is the Director of the One Health Institute (OHI), Office of the Vice President for Research at Colorado State University (CSU). He is also a Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology at CSU, and a Professor of Biostatistics & Informatics at the Colorado School of Public Health.

The Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) is a leader in translating scientific discovery into clinical therapies. Physicians and scientists at WFIRM were the first in the world to engineer laboratory-grown organs that were successfully implanted into humans. Today, this interdisciplinary team is working to engineer more than 30 different replacement tissues and organs and to develop healing cell therapies – all with the goal to cure, rather than merely treat, disease.

Mayo Clinic: The Clinical Immunology and Immunotherapeutics Program at Mayo Clinic is dedicated to translational research on immune-mediated diseases and cancer immunotherapy, with the goal of expanding the scope of clinical immunology from classical areas, including autoimmunity, allergy and transplantation, to emerging fields such as immunotherapy and immunosenescence. Hirohito Kita, M. D., is the head of the Allergic Diseases Research Laboratory (ADRL), and his research is centered around the pathophysiologic mechanisms of allergic diseases with a specific focus on immune cells, innate immunity and mucosal immunity.

Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers University: Martin J. Blaser holds the Henry Rutgers Chair of the Human Microbiome at Rutgers University, where he also serves as Professor of Medicine and Microbiology, and as Director of the CABM. Previously, he served as Chair of the Department of Medicine at New York University. A physician and microbiologist, Dr. Blaser has been studying the relationships we have with our persistently colonizing bacteria. His work over 30 years focused on Campylobacter species and Helicobacter pylori, which also are model systems for understanding the interactions of residential bacteria with their hosts. Over the last 20 years, he has also been actively studying the relationship of the human microbiome with health and important diseases including asthma, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Dr. Blaser has served as the advisor to many students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty. He currently serves as Chair of the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria. He holds 28 U.S. patents, and has authored over 600 original articles. He wrote Missing Microbes, a book targeted to general audiences, now translated into 20 languages.

Adaptive Biotechnologies is a commercial-stage biotechnology company focused on harnessing the inherent biology of the adaptive immune system to transform the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Adaptive proprietary immune medicine platform reveals and translates the massive genetics of the adaptive immune system with scale, precision and speed to develop products in life sciences research, clinical diagnostics, and drug discovery. Adaptive has two commercial products, and a robust clinical pipeline to diagnose, monitor and enable the treatment of diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, and infectious diseases. Adaptive’s goal is to develop and commercialize immune-driven clinical products
tailored to each individual patient.

AMPEL BioSolutions is the leading biomedical research think tank that creatively addresses clinical development bottlenecks and R&D roadblocks. AMPEL interrogates, analyzes,
synthesizes & interprets the world’s biomedical knowledge to provide novel solutions for clinical research questions. Resourceful and dedicated, AMPEL is composed of leading experts in autoimmunity, immunogenicity, inflammation and clinical immunology with extensive research and medical experience to address and resolve obstacles. AMPEL assists nonprofit organizations, pharmaceutical companies, clinical research groups, and others in basic research, translational medicine, preclinical research, drug repositioning, and biomarker identification.

IITRI was founded in 1936 as the research arm of the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 2002, the engineering arm was spun off in an employee buyout to form Alion Science, and IITRI has been entirely focused on life sciences since. IITRI operates as an independent, not-for-profit preclinical contract research organization and research institute. Current facilities include over 100,000 square feet of laboratory space in one location on the IIT campus in Chicago. The following sections provide an overview of general and specialized facilities at IITRI available for the proposed study. Since 1975, IITRI animal facilities have been fully and continuously accredited by the Association for the Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC). IITRI animal facilities operate under an Animal Welfare Assurance (#A3475-01) approved by the NIH-OLAW. IITRI animal facilities are registered with the USDA and are operated in compliance with all cognizant laws concerning animal welfare and use, and IITRI’s animal facilities are regularly inspected by USDA veterinarians. IITRI’s animal facilities are operated under the jurisdiction of the IITRI IACUC (Bruce Gingras, Ph.D., Chair); responsibility for animal facility operations has been assigned by the IACUC to Tara Ooms Konecny, D.V.M., D.A.C.L.A.M., Senior Veterinarian.

Geisinger Health System is an integrated health service organization with over 1 million active patients, widely recognized for its innovative use of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). The EHR data associated with active patients spans multiple years, with a median of 116 laboratory results and 18 medication orders per patient. Demographic and clinical characteristics of the active patients has been reported in two Science publications [8, 9] where DNA sequencing was performed in over 50,000 people as part of a collaborative study (DiscovEHR) between GHS and Regeneron Genetics Center. The integration of genetic data with longitudinal EHR data provides a valuable blueprint for large-scale precision medicine initiatives and genomics-guided therapeutic target discovery. The DiscovEHR collaboration is a powerful platform for human genetics research and hold great promise for genetic discoveries to advance precision medicine.