SATURDAY, MAY 30, 2026
1:55pm – 2:30am

IBD

KEYNOTE #3: Obesity in IBD

Session Learning Objectives:

• To understand the impact of obesity on outcomes in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.
• To learn about the various approaches to managing obesity in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases.

Speaker:
Parakkal Deepak MD, MS, FACG

Professor of Medicine
Co-Director Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Center
Director, Advanced IBD Fellowship
Director of Clinical and Translational Research for the Division of Gastroenterology
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

Parakkal Deepak, MBBS, MS, FACG is currently a physician-scientist in the Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Center in the Division of Gastroenterology at the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM) in St. Louis, Missouri where he is a Professor of Medicine, Co-Director of the IBD center and Director of Clinical and Translation research for the Division of Gastroenterology. He is a Fellow of ACG and has been recognized as a ‘AGA Future Leader’ and elected as Vice Chair of the Immunology, Microbiology and Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Section of the the American Gastroenterological Association. He also serves as the Deputy Director of Data Quality and Enhancement of the prospective longitudinal biobanking cohort, the SPARC-IBD of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and on the core ‘Operations Group’ of the International TOpCLASS Fistula Consortium.

The overarching research focus is refractory inflammatory bowel disease. Within this a key focus area of research is Obesity, its impact and cardiometabolic syndrome in IBD, where his group has made novel observations in prevalence of MASLD, risk of cirrhosis, performance of current ASCVD prediction tools and is investigating the impact of GLP1RAs in patients with IBD through a prospective study funded by Helmsley Trust. His additional research focus is perianal Crohn’s disease, funded by the American Gastroenterological Association, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and the Litwin grant of the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation, apart from investigator-initiated grants funded by industry and philanthropic funding from Leo & Carean Goss Crohn’s Disease Research Fund . Here co-leads a bench-bedside basic-translational-clinical group focused on improving the precision of care in perianal CD through single cell RNAseq and spatial transcriptomics, radiomics from fistula MRI pelvis, standard PET MR/novel tracers and 3D print applications. Additional He is also investigating imaging of inflammation and fibrosis in small bowel CD through novel PET tracers to CCR2 and FAPI. 

He has co-founded the REBOOT IBD consortium across 11 leading IBD centers in the United States to publish real-world data on outcomes with newest advanced therapies in IBD.