An engineered probiotic for diagnosis and mucosal healing in inflammatory bowel disease.

An engineered probiotic strain detects intestinal inflammation and delivers IL-22-Fc to mitigate colitis in models, showing potential for IBD diagnosis and therapy.

• Why it matters: Effective early diagnosis and treatment of IBD are crucial to prevent disease progression, but current integrated diagnostic-therapeutic strategies are limited, highlighting the need for innovative solutions.
• What they did: Researchers designed a synthetic probiotic system that responds to reactive oxygen species to detect inflammation and engineered EcN-IL22 to conditionally express IL-22-Fc, promoting tissue repair in a piglet colitis model.
• The result: Replacing the diagnostic circuit with IL-22-Fc enabled inflammation-triggered therapy, significantly alleviating colitis and demonstrating the platform’s potential for translational IBD treatment.