Systematic Review: Urine Biomarker Discovery for Inflammatory Bowel Disease Diagnosis

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs) are chronic, heterogeneous, and inflammatory conditions mainly affecting the gastrointestinal tract. Currently, endoscopy is the gold standard test for assessing mucosal activity and healing in clinical practice; however, it is a costly, time-consuming, invasive, and uncomfortable procedure for the patients. Therefore, there is an urgent need for sensitive, specific, fast and non-invasive biomarkers for the diagnosis of IBD in medical research. Urine is an excellent biofluid for discovering biomarkers because it is non-invasive to sample. In this review, we aimed to summarize proteomics and metabolomics studies performed in both animal models of IBD and humans that identify urinary biomarkers for IBD diagnosis. Future large-scale multi-omics studies should be conducted in collaboration with clinicians, researchers, and industry to make progress toward the development of sensitive and specific diagnostic biomarkers, thereby making personalized medicine possible.