Joel R. Pekow

About

Joel R. Pekow, MD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at The University of Chicago. His laboratory primarily investigates mechanisms of disease progression, response to therapy, and colon cancer development in patients with inflammatory bowel disease. His research encompasses a range of clinical interests including colon cancer, Crohn's disease, fecal microbiota transplantation, inflammatory bowel disease, intestinal ultrasound, recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, and ulcerative colitis. Dr. Pekow's work involves studying real-world effectiveness and safety of various treatments such as Upadacitinib, Ustekinumab, Mirikizumab, and Ozanimod in inflammatory bowel disease, as well as developing luminescent biosensors for calprotectin. His contributions include analyzing endoscopic phenotypes, disease activity indices, and transition of J-pouch phenotypes over time, advancing understanding of disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses in inflammatory bowel disease.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Biology
• Gastroenterology
• Genetics
• Computational biology
• Surgery
• Pathology
• Microbiology

Selected publications

• A human tissue map of 5-hydroxymethylcytosines exhibits tissue specificity through gene and enhancer modulation

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 218 citations

  DNA 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) modification is known to be associated with gene transcription and frequently used as a mark to investigate dynamic DNA methylation conversion during mammalian development and in human diseases. However, the lack of genome-wide 5hmC profiles in different human tissue types impedes drawing generalized conclusions about how 5hmC is implicated in transcription activity and tissue specificity. To meet this need, we describe the development of a 5hmC tissue map by c…

  DOI

• Fecal Microbiota Transplantation Is Highly Effective in Real-World Practice: Initial Results From the FMT National Registry

  Gastroenterology · 2020 · 199 citations

  DOI

• Large-scale sequencing identifies multiple genes and rare variants associated with Crohn’s disease susceptibility

  Nature Genetics · 2022 · 180 citations

  DOI

• Upadacitinib Is Effective and Safe in Both Ulcerative Colitis and Crohn’s Disease: Prospective Real-World Experience

  Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology · 2023 · 121 citations

  DOI

• Effectiveness of Ustekinumab Dose Escalation in Patients With Crohn’s Disease

  Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology · 2020 · 105 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

Recent grants

• New model to dissect molecular pathways in IBD-neoplasia using human colonoids

  NIH · $162k · 2017–2019

• Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Inflammatory Intestinal DIsorders (C-IID)

  NIH · $35.2M · 1996–2026

• NIH Grant K08DK090152

  NIH · $732k · 2017

Frequent coauthors

• David Hudesman

  519 shared

• Sumona Saha

  UW Health University Hospital

  519 shared

• Meenakshi Bewtra

  University of Pennsylvania

  516 shared

• Parakkal Deepak

  279 shared

• Matthew A. Ciorba

  273 shared

• Richard H. Duerr

  268 shared

• Poonam Beniwal‐Patel

  Medical College of Wisconsin

  267 shared

• Shrinivas Bishu

  266 shared

Labs

• Joel R. PekowPI

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