FIGURE 3.

Path forward to IBD biomarker discovery and qualification. The end goal of the IBD biomarker field will be to enable precision medicine in clinical practice and effective clinical trials. This will be possible throughout a concerted effort among different stakeholders who will establish effective collaborations for biomarker discovery, validation, and qualification. These coalitions will utilize harmonized processes and data from real-world longitudinal cohorts, which will be critical for the identification of biomarkers with reproducible, generalizable, and enhanced performance in diverse IBD patient populations. Given the variety of biomarker needs in IBD, the implementation of diversified technological and analytical platforms, including machine learning, will be essential not only to identify novel biomarkers but also to define a gold-standard measurement that can be used as a comparator benchmark for novel biomarkers.