Dermot McGovern, MD: Sherman Prize 2024
Dr McGovern, one of the winners of the 2024 Sherman Prize, reviews the work of his group at Cedars-Sinai in the genetics of IBD and their efforts to clarify the heterogeneity of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease.
Dermot McGovern, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and director of Translational Research in the F. Widjaja Inflammatory Bowel Disease Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.
Hello, I'm Dermot McGovern from Cedars -Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. I'm here at AIBD having been honored with receiving the Sherman Prize this year. This honor is in recognition of my group's work and we focus on the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease and applying that sort of data using artificial intelligence and machine learning to try and understand the clinical heterogeneity of the inflammatory bowel diseases. And the idea of this is that we and use those sort of technologies and approaches to lead to a more personalized approach to treatment and prediction in IBD.
One of the main focuses of our group is to extend these studies to non-European ancestry populations, because that's where most of the work has been done. And we've made some progress, not enough, but some progress in African American, East Asian and Hispanic populations. And because we're now beginning to see these diseases evolve in places that we haven't seen before, like Africa. A more recent focus of my group's work is that we're now studying the evolution of IBD in sub-Saharan Africa. The Sherman Prize will allow us to build on that work that we've done in Africa so that we can really make sure that we're bringing the benefits of genetics and other advances to all populations—a philosophy of ours is to make sure that we're using these technologies to close the gaps, close the disparities in health care across populations, not to make them worse and Sherman Prize will certainly help us achieve that.
