Differences in microbiome populations following hematopoietic stem cell transplantation in Crohn?s disease patients

Treatment of severely refractory Crohn’s disease (CD) patients remains a clinical challenge. Recent studies show the efficacy of autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) in these severely compromised patients. HSCT is thought to eliminate auto-reactive cells; however, no specific studies of immune reconstitution in CD patients are available. We studied a group of CD patients (n=18) receiving autologous HSCT. We studied changes in the microbiome induced by HSCT and some non-CD samples. Biopsy 16S profiles of CD patients undergoing HSCT were generated by deep sequencing, using MiSeq (Illumina, San Diego, CA)