Cure8 research brief
Why This Matters
This matters because identifying microbiome patterns linked to infliximab response could help predict which children with IBD are more likely to benefit from the drug and guide personalized treatment decisions in the future.
Who Should Pay Attention
Pediatric patients and caregivers, clinicians treating pediatric IBD, researchers studying IBD therapeutics or the gut microbiome, and patients on biologic therapy interested in treatment response predictors.
Study Snapshot
What To Know
This systematic review pooled 13 studies (242 pediatric IBD patients) that examined how infliximab (IFX) treatment is associated with gut microbiome changes and whether microbiome features relate to treatment response.
Across studies, overall microbial alpha diversity findings were inconsistent, but changes in community composition (beta-diversity), taxonomic shifts, and functional/metabolomic pathways were more consistently linked to IFX exposure.
Taxa such as Faecalibacterium, Subdoligranulum, and Bifidobacterium were more often enriched in treatment responders, while non-responders tended to show higher Gammaproteobacteria and Candida. Functional signals included shifts in bile-acid and short-chain fatty acid–related metabolism.
The review concludes IFX is associated with compositional and functional microbiome shifts in pediatric IBD, but diversity does not uniformly recover; authors call for larger, standardized studies to validate microbiome markers for treatment stratification.
Keep In Mind
Structured content depth: abstract — the brief is grounded in the article abstract and systematic-review summary; it does not reflect independent re-analysis of individual study data. Findings are associative; the review highlights heterogeneity across studies and calls for larger standardized research before clinical use of microbiome biomarkers.
Source Details
Review the original publication for the complete reporting, methods, and context.
This Cure8 brief is based on source text from the linked article. Cure8 is informational only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.