October 2022

GASTROENTEROLOGY

PARAMBIR S. DULAI, MD, AWARDED $25,000 SHERMAN EMERGING LEADER PRIZE

Featuring: Parambir S. Dulai, MD

Parambir S. Dulai, MD, is an associate professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Northwestern Medicine and the director of GI Clinical Trials and Precision Medicine and director of the Digestive Health Foundation BioRepository. Dr. Dulai has been announced as the recipient of the Sherman Emerging Leader Prize, recognizing excellence in the field of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, also known as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD). The Sherman Emerging Leader Prize is awarded to an IBD professional who, early in their career, has contributed to an advancement and shows great promise for significant future contributions.
 
The Bruce and Cynthia Sherman Charitable Foundation is awarding Dr. Dulai the $25,000 Sherman Emerging Leader Prize for championing hyperbaric oxygen therapy to alleviate suffering in people with ulcerative colitis. For 10 years, he has relentlessly pursued this research to see if this approach can heal acute symptoms in people hospitalized with ulcerative colitis. He’s particularly interested in hyperbaric oxygen because it is widely available in community hospitals, which means that, if it works, every patient hospitalized for ulcerative colitis has the potential to get treated and discharged safely, without a need for surgery.
 
Dr. Dulai is making plans to lead a phase 3 investigator-initiated trial (IIT) — the first conducted in hospitalized ulcerative colitis patients in the U.S. He is hopeful that it will result in the first FDA-approved treatment developed outside of the pharmaceutical industry — providing a transformational therapy for patients. To make this study possible, Dr. Dulai built a large collaborative consortium, integrating professional networks to conduct large IITs. He’s also credited with developing the IBD Clinical Decision Support Tool (CDST), a free online treatment decision-making tool that has been used by more than 3,000 clinicians.
 
Dr. Dulai has also identified a novel biomarker in ulcerative colitis that he licensed for drug development. He hopes this research will help bring a personalized treatment revolution to the field of IBD and radically transform the way these diseases are treated.
 
Short films highlighting the Sherman Emerging Leader Prize recipients’ achievements will premiere during special sessions to honor them at the Advances in IBD (AIBD) conference in Orlando, Florida, on December 6.
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Parambir S. Dulai, MD, ​Associate Professor of Medicine (Gastroenterology and Hepatology)

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