Jacob L Mccauley
University of Miami, FL·Genetics
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) occurs when the immune system of the gut lining mistakenly attacks the normal bacteria living there, producing chronic inflammation that can lead to surgery and cancer. About 1% of the US population is affected.
- Fields
Genetics
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
inflammatory bowel disease
Crohn's disease
ulcerative colitis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Expand enrollment of a deeply phenotyped IBD cohort across South Florida and the wider state, substantially increasing the Hispanic genetic sample collection in the US for Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis.
- Use genome-wide association analysis together with transcriptomic and epigenetic profiling to identify genomic differences that distinguish clinical subtypes of IBD within this cohort.
- Fine-map previously identified IBD risk loci to pinpoint the specific variants of likely functional significance rather than the broad regions.
- Test how local genetic ancestry interacts with genotype to shape disease presentation, examining genotype-ancestry interactions against carefully recorded clinical phenotypes.
More about the research
It has long been treated as a disease mainly of people of European ancestry, but incidence has plateaued in wealthy countries while rising sharply elsewhere — and in the US it is climbing in communities such as South Florida, where many residents trace their ancestry to Latin America. Because most genetic studies of IBD have enrolled narrow populations, the genetic picture of the disease is incomplete for a large share of patients.
Why it matters
Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis impose surgery, cancer risk, disability and heavy economic and social costs. Hispanic Americans, both foreign-born and first-generation, are developing IBD in rising numbers yet are underrepresented in the genetic studies that guide drug targets and risk prediction. Enlarging and deeply characterizing this cohort could reveal risk variants and pathways missed by earlier studies, informing prevention strategies and treatments that work across the full range of patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Ling-shiang Chuang
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, NY·Genetics
Profile perianal fistula tissue from Crohn's disease patients with single-cell multiome ATAC plus transcriptome and spatial transcriptomics, which measure open DNA, gene activity and location cell by cell.
Pawel Kiela
University of Arizona, AZ·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether loss of NAD+ or excess PARylation by the enzyme PARP1 is the main driver of experimental colitis, using PARP1 knockout mice and drug inhibition.
Mateus Gouveia
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Genetics·Early-career
Map subcontinental ancestries across Africa, the Americas, and Europe by assembling genome-wide data on roughly 75,000 ancestrally diverse individuals and applying current population genomics methods.
The school
University of Miami: 30 labs on PI Pages, $559M a year on research, 297 research doctorates a year.
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