Editorial Foreword: Challenging Academic Participation

This issue contributes to the growing criticisms of and challenges to participatory methods and cultural participation by focusing on ‘academic participation’. By academic participation, we refer to the use of participatory methodologies in academic research, but we also aim to expand the term by including reflections on the modes and conditions of taking part — willingly and unwillingly — in academic systems and institutions as such. The articles of this issue invite the reader to reconsider what and how participation looks like in the academy. Taken together, they suggest that we might need to broaden how we understand, apply and critique participation in academic research: from the participatory methods applied in specific research projects, to how we might foster a more participatory academic system that rejects the current individualization, financialization, and exploitation at play

A proposal for a study on treatment selection and lifestyle recommendations in chronic inflammatory diseases:A danish multidisciplinary collaboration on prognostic factors and personalised medicine

Chronic inflammatory diseases (CIDs), including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis (inflammatory bowel diseases, IBD), rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, spondyloarthritides, hidradenitis suppurativa, and immune-mediated uveitis, are treated with biologics targeting the pro-inflammatory molecule tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF) (i.e., TNF inhibitors). Approximately one-third of the patients do not respond to the treatment. Genetics and lifestyle may affect the treatment results. The aims of this multidisciplinary collaboration are to identify (1) molecular signatures of prognostic value to help tailor treatment decisions to an individual likely to initiate TNF inhibitor therapy, followed by (2) lifestyle factors that support achievement of optimised treatment outcome. This report describes the establishment of a cohort that aims to obtain this information. Clinical data including lifestyle and treatment response and biological specimens (blood, faeces, urine, and, in IBD patients, intestinal biopsies) are sampled prior to and while on TNF inhibitor therapy. Both hypothesis-driven and data-driven analyses will be performed according to pre-specified protocols including pathway analyses resulting from candidate gene expression analyses and global approaches (e.g., metabolomics, metagenomics, proteomics). The final purpose is to improve the lives of patients suffering from CIDs, by providing tools facilitating treatment selection and dietary recommendations likely to improve the clinical outcome