Iterative Scopes Announces IBD-Focused Scientific Advisory Board

Iterative Scopes is expanding its Scientific Advisory Board to include experts in both inflammatory bowel disease and artificial intelligence (AI) and IBD.
 
“Our evolution as an MIT start-up and our continued relationships with senior artificial intelligence scientists there has allowed us to attract and retain top talent in the very competitive machine learning space,” said Stan Norton, chief technology officer. “This technical prowess lets us amplify the clinical expertise of the Scientific Advisory Board in groundbreaking ways.”
 
“I’m honored to collaborate with like-minded scientists and physicians who recognize the talented team at Iterative Scopes and the incredible potential to apply machine learning and artificial intelligence to the improved care of patients with chronic digestive illnesses,” added Dr. David Rubin, clinical chair of the Scientific Advisory Board.
 
In addition to clinical leaders in IBD, Iterative Scopes is excited to bring on board world-renowned machine learning experts. Polina Golland, professor at MIT and the AI chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at Iterative Scopes noted, “I am excited to work with this impressive team of physicians and the amazing Iterative Scopes machine learning team to bring the advanced machine learning methods to bear on important problems of disease detection and progression modelling, and to ultimately improve patient care and outcomes.” 
 
Chairs of Iterative Scopes Scientific Advisory Board: 
David Rubin, M.D. (Clinical Chair) – Dr. Rubin is chief, Section of Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition, and the co-director of the Digestive Diseases Center at The University of Chicago Medicine in Illinois. Rubin is a researcher on topics involving novel IBD therapies and outcomes, colon cancer prevention, and clinical medical ethics.
Polina Golland, Ph.D. (AI Chair) – Dr. Golland is a Henry Ellis Warren (1894) professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Dr. Golland’s primary research interest is in developing novel machine learning and statistical inference techniques for biomedical image analysis and understanding. 
 
Members of the Iterative Scopes Clinical IBD Scientific Advisory Board include:
Jessica Allegretti, M.D., MPH – Allegretti is a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she serves as the director of Clinical Research. She is also the associate director of the Crohn’s and Colitis Center. Dr. Allegretti developed the hospital’s Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Program and has grown to become an international expert on the topic. Dr. Allegretti’s research focuses on the intestinal microbiome and the consequences of its derangement, with the goal of understanding the role dysbiosis plays in microbial associated diseases, with a particular interest in c. difficile infections (CDI) and its effect on patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). In addition, her lab focuses on novel therapeutic agents for IBD and she is leading multiple sponsored and investigator initiated drug trials.  
 
Ashwin Ananthakrishnan, M.D., MPH – Dr. Ananthakrishnan is an associate professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and is medical co-director at the Massachusetts General Hospital Crohn’s and Colitis Center. He is conducting clinical research that examines the course of disease and response to various therapies with the aim of developing predictive models that can be used both to inform about disease course as well the likelihood of response to specific therapy. He is particularly interested in novel tools to monitor disease activity and identify complications.
 
Raf Bisschops, M.D., Ph.D. – Dr. Bisschops is the head of Endoscopy at KU Leuven and associate professor of Medicine at University of Leuven in Belgium. Dr. Bisschops specializes in advanced endoscopic imaging techniques. 
 
Yoram Bouhnik, PUPH – Dr. Bouhnik is professor of Gastroenterology and head of the Department of Gastroenterology, IBD (inflammatory bowel disease) and Nutritive Assistance at Beaujon Hospital, Clichy, APHP, Paris University, France. With GETAID, he conducted international multi-center clinical studies in IBD dedicated to the development of a new scores/index based on radiology and endoscopy with the aim to go towards a personalized medicine. He is also a member of national and international Gastroenterology and IBD Societies and involved in Scientific and Educational Committees.
 
Brian Bressler, M.D., MS, FRCPC – Dr. Bressler is a clinical associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Medicine. Dr. Bressler is the director of the Advanced IBD training program at the University of British Columbia and co-founder of the IBD Centre of BC. He is a recognized expert in inflammatory bowel disease.
 
Jean-Frederic Colombel, M.D. – Dr. Colombel is professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the director of the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust IBD Center, and director of the Susan and Leonard Feinstein IBD Center. Dr. Colombel has been involved in all aspects of research in IBD for 40 years, past-president of ECCO and past chair of IOIBD. He is best known for his participation in the identification of NOD2 as a susceptibility gene for Crohn’s disease, and the identification of a new subtype of Escherichia coli associated with Crohn’s disease, as well as the development of the Anti-Saccharomyces Cerevisiae Antibody (ASCA) test, which remains the most sensitive and specific marker for Crohn’s disease. Dr. Colombel is author or co-author of more than 950 articles, most of them in the domain of IBD.
 
Iris Dotan, M.D. – Dr. Dotan is the director of the Division of Gastroenterology at the Rabin Medical Center, Petah Tikva, Israel, affiliated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv, Israel. She is a specialist in internal medicine, gastroenterology and liver diseases. Her clinical and research interests focus on biomarker-based stratification of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases and a personalized approach to their treatment and care, biologicals and novel therapies for inflammatory bowel disease. She is the past president of the Israeli Association of Gastroenterology and Liver Diseases, a member of ECCO, the deputy chair of the IOIBD, and the scientific committee of UEG. 
 
Frank Farraye, MD, MS – Dr. Farraye is a senior sssociate consultant in the section of Gastroenterology and Hepatology and professor of Medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., where he directs the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center. Dr. Farraye is a clinical investigator examining several aspects of the clinical management of patients with inflammatory bowel disease. He has served on numerous national and international committees including as a member of the American College of Gastroenterology Board of Trustees.
 
Seth Gross, M.D. – Dr. Gross is a professor within the Department of Medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He also serves as the director of Clinical Care and Quality in the Division of Gastroenterology. His expertise is in screening people for cancer and diagnosing and treating them for complex gastrointestinal conditions, such as cancers, precancerous conditions, and difficult to find gastrointestinal bleeding.
 
Charlie Lees, M.D. – Dr. Lees is a professor of Gastroenterology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and consultant gastroenterologist at the Western General Hospital and Spire Shawfair Park Hospitals in Edinburgh. Dr. Lees is an international expert in the management of inflammatory bowel disease (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) and leading the research on the impact of genetics, environmental factors (including diet) and the microbiota on the disease course of IBD and disease flare.
 
Edward V. Loftus Jr., M.D. – Dr. Loftus is professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and co-director of the Advanced IBD Fellowship program at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. Dr. Loftus has published over 400 original articles, editorials, and book chapters, and has lectured extensively on the epidemiology, natural history, diagnosis, and medical management of IBD. He has served on the steering committees of several multi-center clinical trials of investigational agents for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
 
Neeraj Narula, M.D. – Dr. Narula is the director of the IBD clinic at McMaster University and staff gastroenterologist in Hamilton Health Sciences. After attending medical school at the University of Alberta, he completed internal medicine residency and gastroenterology fellowship training at McMaster University. He completed the Present-Levison advanced IBD fellowship in Mount Sinai Medical Centre in New York, N.Y., in 2015. Dr. Narula obtained a master’s degree in public health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in 2018. He has over 70 peer-reviewed publications in the field of IBD and authored four textbook chapters.
 
Mark Silverberg, M.D., PhD, FRCPC – Dr. Silverberg is a gastroenterologist at Mount Sinai Hospital and a researcher affiliated with the hospital’s Zane Cohen Centre for Digestive Diseases and the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute. Dr. Silverberg conducts leading-edge research to discover genetic markers and other biomarkers related to IBD, to allow more personalized approaches to its treatment. He is an elected member of the International Organization for the study of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IOIBD), runs a research centre of the NIH IBD Genetics Consortium and is an active participant in the International IBD Consortium
 
Shyam Thakkar, M.D. – Dr. Thakkar is the director of Advanced Therapeutic Endoscopy at West Virginia University Section of Gastroenterology & Hepatology. Along with his clinical work, Dr. Thakkar has served as the principal investigator on numerous studies, with his most recent research focusing on natural orifice surgery and optimizing colonoscopy using artificial intelligence. He has been recognized for his innovation, research, and contributions to the community by the American Society of Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, American College of Gastroenterology, and the National Pancreas Foundation.
 
Members of the Iterative Scopes ML IBD Scientific Advisory Board include:
Assaf Zeevi, Ph.D., MS – Dr. Zeevi is a professor and holder of the Kravis Chair at the Columbia Business School, Columbia University in New York, N.Y. His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of operations research, statistics, and machine learning.
 
Rahul G. Krishnan, Ph.D. – Dr. Krishnan is currently a senior researcher at Microsoft Research and, this fall will be an assistant professor of Computer Science and Medicine at the University of Toronto and a member of the Vector Institute, where he holds a CIFAR AI chair. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and its applications to healthcare with a focus on deep learning, probabilistic modeling and causal inference. 
 
Iterative Scopes is a gastrointestinal data company, working to deliver AI toolkits to the practice of gastroenterology to provide real-time, actionable insights to providers and the life sciences. Spun out of MIT in 2017, the team has since raised $14 million in funding and is based out of Cambridge, Mass.