R. Balfour Sartor MD

R. Balfour Sartor is a board-certified gastroenterologist with expertise in managing difficult-to-treat patients with inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and a mucosal immunologist/microbiologist with a long-term interest in understanding mechanisms by which resident microbiota induce chronic intestinal inflammation vs. mucosal homeostasis. His research develops and studies rodent models of chronic, immune-mediated intestinal inflammation relevant to IBD and performs clinically relevant translational studies involving IBD patients. He investigates host genetically determined immune responses to luminal resident microbial components using gnotobiotic mice and patient-derived samples, and studies the influence of environmental factors on intestinal microbiota composition and function.

He has provided pivotal data demonstrating the key role of resident enteric bacteria in driving chronic colitis and small intestinal inflammation. He has shown the essential role of resident enteric bacteria in inducing and maintaining enterocolitis using genetically engineered rodent models. More recently, he has investigated the differential ability of various resident microbiota species to stimulate protective immune responses in normal hosts, with a pivotal observation that IL-10 secreted by antigen-presenting cells in response to resident microbiota is a key determinant of mucosal protection against chronic inflammation by inducing regulatory T cells