Ms Anna Carrasco will present her thesis before a jury panel comprised of Dr. Eduard Cabré Gelada, part-time lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and consulting physician in the Gastroenterology Department of Germans Trias i Pujol University Hospital; Dr. Azucena Salas, part-time lecturer at the University of Barcelona and researcher at IDIBAPS (August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute) (Esther Koplowitz centre) and Dr. Belén Beltrán, consulting physician at the Gastroenterology Department of Hospital La Fe in Valencia and visiting professor at the University of Valencia.







This PhD thesis compiles various publications and is based on two studies carried out and published in the prestigious Journal of Crohn's and Colitis. The PhD student presents her studies based on the idea that there must be a balance between the tolerogenic and proinflammatory responses in the gastrointestinal immune system in order to maintain the homeostasis of the system. Therefore, she focuses her research on an area that is not well known and hardly researched: how the immune response differs in the various intestinal regions (ileum, right colon, left colon) for health conditions and disease.







The first study published aims to determine if there are differences between the areas of healthy intestines and whether these differences hold true for inflamed mucosa. The second study aims to determine the similarities and differences in the immune response of mucosa between two forms of microscopic colitis: collagenous colitis and lymphocytic colitis.