Biologics and immune-targeting therapies have long dominated the treatment landscape for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). But at the European Crohn's and Colitis Organization (ECCO) congress in Stockholm last week, the conversation took a notable turn. With over 7,000 gastroenterologists, IBD specialists, nurses, and dietitians in attendance, nutrition, and specifically the nutraceutical CurQD, emerged as a repeated focus.
Following the session, Prof. Shomron Ben-Horin, Chief of Gastroenterology at Sheba Medical Center and co-founder/CMO of Evinature, shared further clinical insights on the role of CurQD and nutritional approaches in IBD.
Nutrition Gains Prominence
According to Ben-Horin, "Nutrition featured heavily on the program with CurQD being highlighted as a novel therapeutic nutraceutical for patients."
In a plenary talk, Professor Henit Yanai from Rabin Medical Center reviewed "emerging evidence about the role of dietary and nutritional approaches to help control the underlying inflammation in Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis." Yanai emphasized that healthier diets, such as the Mediterranean diet and others, "can be combined with IBD medications to possibly improve outcomes."
On CurQD specifically, Yanai described how she "uses the nutraceutical CurQD as an add-on in patients whose disease is not fully controlled by biologics and reviewed the clinical evidence attesting to the efficacy of CurQD in patients with active colitis and its recent inclusion in the ECCO guidelines on nutritional therapy for IBD."
Early Clinical Signals
Another lecture that drew attention came from Professor Konstantinos Gerasimidis at the University of Glasgow, who described a clinical trial comparing Crohn's patients starting adalimumab biologic therapy alone versus patients starting adalimumab with a formula diet providing 50% of their calories. Ben-Horin summarized the findings: "Although the addition of formula did not improve clinical remission rate, there was a signal for better calprotectin reduction as possibly indicating better control of inflammation."
Investigating the Roots of Flares
Ben-Horin also presented results from research led by Professor Yael Haberman's lab at Sheba Medical Center. The study compared two groups of Crohn's patients, one in clinical remission and one with active disease, and a third group of healthy individuals. Using advanced laboratory techniques, the researchers discovered that "biologic treatments caused effective suppression of immune cells in the gut of patients in remission, compared to patients with active disease."
Yet, as Ben-Horin noted, "to the researchers' surprise, they found that the effective treatment with biologics did not affect the harmful profile of microbes, dietary patterns, and metabolites in the gut of patients in remission, which was still significantly worse than the profile in healthy individuals, and was not much changed from that of patients with active disease." He added that these findings "may help explain why patients in clinical remission induced by biologics still often lose response to drugs and experience re-emergence of inflammation and clinical symptoms, pinpointing the culprit to the fact that biologics suppress the immune cells but do not restore the dietary-metabolomic-microbiomic healthy state of the gut."
Combining Therapies for Lasting Remission
Reflecting on the implications, Ben-Horin said these results "give rise to the notion of combining biologics or other IBD medications with nutritional approaches to adequately address and achieve long-lasting remission in IBD." He also highlighted preliminary data from his own group, showing that "patients with ulcerative colitis who had active symptoms and inflammation despite a biologic (vedolizumab) treatment, were able to regain their response and remission when the nutraceutical CurQD was added to the biologic, in conjunction."
Toward Integrated IBD Care
From Ben-Horin's perspective, ECCO 2026 underscored a critical insight: "The research increasingly shows a role for the nutraceutical CurQD in combination with IBD medications to act in concert on both the immune and the metabolic fronts to achieve better control of disease activity and longer remission."
The congress suggests that the future of IBD management may increasingly involve dual-front strategies, particularly immune suppression paired with metabolic and nutritional modulation, to improve remission durability and patient outcomes.
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