apparently this drug has been in clinical trial for a few years for pouchitis and Dr.Shen is heading phase 2. heres a quote,“We are pleased to initiate this exploratory trial with AST-120 for the
treatment of active pouchitis where there is a significant unmet medical
need,” said Bo Shen, M.D., Principal Investigator at the Center for
Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Cleveland Clinic. “In vitro absorption studies
have shown that AST-120 has a high absorption capacity for bile acids and
is expected to protect the intestinal mucosa of the pouch from inflammation
exacerbated by bile acids.”

I have been on Entocort for almost 2 months with no improvement. I have my annual scope with him next friday so i am going to ask him about this.At this point i would be willing to join some clinical trials.

http://www.bioportfolio.com/re...otic-refractory.html

HERE IS A LINK DESCRIBING IT

Interesting! Thanks for sharing.

Just wondering if you ended up enrolling in this clinical trial? Any idea from Dr. Shen on how it's going?

Since pouchitis is linked to ulcerative colitis, I wonder if treatment/cure happens when the cure ulcerative colitis.

I may be mistaken, but I think the only pouchers who get pouchitis are those who have UC or Crohns.

quote:

I may be mistaken, but I think the only pouchers who get pouchitis are those who have UC or Crohns.

Pouchitis can happen to anyone with a pouch. It's a bacterial overgrowth of 'bad' bacteria in the pouch. Cuffitis is probably what you're thinking of, and that is basically a UC/CD flare in the part of the rectum left during the colectomy.

Poucho, let me know if you got in (unless you signed a NDA and can't) and/or what they said about it. This is really interesting to me. I'm an acid factory. I take nexium daily and still have issues a couple of times a week. I've often noticed a correlation to my pouch behavior and the amount of acid I'm producing.

Let us know how this turns out, very interested! I'm also going to ask my dr about low dose naltrexone, a chiropractor recommended it to me because he has other pt's who are doing really well with it. I definitely feel very acidic, but haven't felt better taking meds for it. I'm also going to to try to eat more ph balanced foods-like juicing raw greens...

google search has this dated 3/6/2013, so not sure if this was updated recently cuz article is dated 2008. i am going to email Shen and ask him about this.

New info i just saw on this new pouchitis drug..

http://www.gastroendonews.com/...?d_id=183&a_id=10244

I emailed Shen about this AST-120,and he stated the company that was manufacturing this drug ran out of funding. the trials are over, and it sucks cuz it looked like it had alot of promise