Single‐cell gene expression analysis
Single‐cell RNA sequencing was also performed to assess potential treatment‐induced changes in cellular composition as well as differential gene expression in cells isolated from the sigmoid colon.A total of 112,392 cells were collected from all patients at two time points. After rigorous filtering, 40897 high‐quality cells were retained from both time points from all but two patients. The cells were annotated with genes preferentially expressed in colonic cell types, and almost all the expected cell types in sigmoid colon tissue were recovered (Figure Cell types detected by single cell RNA sequencing and changed expression of IL‐1 signature genes. (A) Uniform manifold approximation and projection (UMAP) plot of single‐cell data. Each dot represents one cell. Cells with similar gene expression profiles are clustered by the Leiden algorithm implemented in the 


Cell‐type abundance analysis as well as differential gene expression analysis using the pseudobulk method was also performed. No significant differences in cellular composition or gene expression were observed between the two treatment arms. Using BioQC, we identified a few cell types that showed changed expression of IL‐1 signature genes, especially inflammatory monocytes, which is in line with the expected mode of action of selnoflast (Figure In summary, although the effects of selnoflast on the IL‐1 gene signature showed a trend in the right direction, the effect was rather modest compared with that of other therapeutic agents such as anti‐TNF or anti‐IL‐6 antibodies.