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KEYNOTE ADDRESS
How To Treat a Patient with Crohn's Disease After They Have Undergone Intestinal Resection

Parambir S. Dulai, MD received his medical degree from Dayanand Medical College in Ludhiana Punjab, and subsequently completed his internal medicine residency and chief residency at Dartmouth. He went on to complete an NIH sponsored T32 research fellowship in Gastroenterology and Hepatology at the University of California San Diego under the mentorship of William J. Sandborn focused on biomarker discovery and drug development. Subsequently, he completed a two-year IBD fellowship jointly at UC San Diego and Robarts Clinical Trials (now Alimentiv) under the joint mentorship of William J. Sandborn and Brian Feagan focused on clinical trial endpoints and design methodology. Following the completion of his fellowships he joined faculty at UC San Diego where he was co-mentored by Lucilla Ohno-Machado, a world-renowned expert in bioinformatics, data modeling, and distributed computing, and Rob Knight, a well-recognized pioneer in the field of microbiome research and high-throughput multi-dimensional data generation and computation. The totality of his training in clinical trials for IBD, end-point development, multi-omic data integration, and multi-level data modeling, has allowed him to embark into the field of human-translational research with a specific focus on integrating evolving technology and methodology to study host-immune-microbe interactions in the context of therapeutic interventions. His goal is to provide a growing framework for how we in the field of IBD can begin to develop and validate companion tools and/or biomarkers for disease prognosis, treatment prediction, and drug development programs.

He now has a robust research program at Northwestern University which spans population health, industry sponsored clinical trials, federally funded clinical trials, and bench research focused on biomarker discovery with novel spatial biology platforms. He serves as the Director of GI Clinical Trials and Precision Medicine for the Digestive Health Center at Northwestern University as well as the Director for the Digestive Health Foundation Biorepository which has an extensive biobank of human samples across different immune mediated disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. He is on multiple external and internal steering committees including the Center for Human Immunobiology at Northwestern University which aims to discover and translate innovative science into cures for immune-regulated diseases. He is the PI for a large NIH funded consortium of investigators working to build out a clinical trials framework for hospitalized ulcerative colitis patients and has built out a large precision medicine network with multiple decision support tools now available in routine practice to guide the use of available biologics (www.CDSTforIBD.com). Several of the tools built have now been developed into point-of-care tools for use by clinicians and/or are being developed into medical devices across the world. He has over 200 peer-reviewed publications, lectures widely both nationally and internationally, and was the 2022 recipient of the Sherman Emerging Leader prize which recognizes early career high performers with great promise for significant future contributions.