The Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute is an integrated group of clinical and basic scientists dedicated to understanding the impact of digestive health and nutrition on disease across the life span.

The Institute is focused on developing new strategies for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of intestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, which will have global benefits. However, the focus of research in the Institute is not limited to digestive diseases; rather, it includes diseases of many other organ systems that may be caused and/or profoundly influenced by digestive health and nutrition.

There is a strong focus on the role of the intestinal microbiota in health and disease and the Institute contains Canada’s only gnotobiotic laboratory, a metagenomics platform and a microbiology laboratory specializing in the culture of human commensal bacteria. There is a clinical research centre within the institute that conducts clinical trials, meta-analyses epidemiological studies conducted in affiliated hospitals as well as on a national and international basis. The institute has a large complement of technical staff, graduate students and research fellows as well as administrative staff.