Dr. John Warren

Dr. Warren is a Professor of Medicine with the University of Maryland School of Medicine and has been investigating Interstitial Cystitis/Pain Bladder Syndrome (IC/PBS) since 1992.

He received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and trained there in infectious diseases as well.  Since 1975 he has been investigating the pathogenesis of urinary tract infections, going from epidemiology to molecular and cellular biology studies.  In 1992, because of this interest, he began to address IC/PBS.  The National Institute of Diabetes, Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) currently fund his research.  First attracted to this disease because of the possibility that IC/PBS was simply an unusual infection, he and Susan Keay, MD, PhD demonstrated that at least in established IC/PBS cases, there was no evidence of ongoing infection.  Continued to be intrigued by this disease, he and Dr. Keay hypothesized and then identified a substance in urine, now known as antiproliferative factor, which is found in the great majority of IC/PBS patients but in only a small number of asymptomatic controls or those with other urologic diseases.

Returning to his roots in epidemiology and with the help of the Interstitial Cystitis Association and the Fishbein Family Foundation, Dr. Warren and his colleagues demonstrated that there was a family aggregation of IC/PBS.  Specifically, these investigators found that the prevalence of IC/PBS in first-degree relatives (parents, siblings, and children) of patients with IC/PBS had 17 times the prevalence of IC/PBS than one would expect from the general population.  Moreover, he demonstrated that co-twins of IC/PBS patients who were identical twins had many times the prevalence of IC/PBS than did fraternal twins.  Because identical twins share all their genes and fraternal twins, just like any other brother or sister, only half their genes, these findings also were consistent with a genetic susceptibility to IC/PBS.  Dr. Warren, as principal investigator, is now heading up the Maryland Genetics of Interstitial Cystitis (the MaGIC study) under the sponsorship of the NIDDK.

Features which distinguish people with a disease from those who otherwise are similar but do not have the disease are known as risk factors.  Commonly, risk factors provide clues to the cause of a disease.  Dr. Warren and his colleagues are performing a case control study of IC/PBS called Events Preceding Interstitial Cystitis (the EPIC study) in which IC/PBS cases are matched by age and region of the country to controls who do not have the disease to identify risk factors for IC/PBS.

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