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Laura McCabe had been living a dual professional life at Michigan State University for more than a decade, studying bone in her lab while teaching medical students gastrointestinal physiology in the classroom, when she came across a call for proposals from the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation. Could researchers look into how inflammatory bowel diseases affect bone? “I thought, ‘This is me!’” McCabe says. In 2007, with grant funding in hand, her two disciplines had collided.
Researchers already knew that patients with inflammatory bowel disease have bone loss; the question was why. In mouse experiments, McCabe found that exposing the animals to bacterial infections of the intestine or to a detergent that causes breaks in the gut’s epithelial barrier could lead to bone erosion. “It became clear [that] we could do all these bad things to the gut and make it inflamed ...
