IBD: immunologic research at The Mount Sinai Hospital.

An evolution in our understanding of the inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease, correlates with increased knowledge of the function of the mucosal immune system. In the early 1960s and 1970s, IBD was considered to be an autoimmune disease in which there was a directed attack by humoral and cellular elements of the immune system against intestinal tissues. These studies did not withstand the test of time, and from the 1970s through the 1990s there was a growing appreciation that defects in cellular immunity, not auto-reactive in nature, played a larger role in disease pathogenesis. Research at Mount Sinai focused in on these cellular T cell defects and helped pave the way for the current model of disease pathogenesis.