A recent study showed that DCs in lymph nodes shared between the pancreas and duodenum utilize ALDH1a2 to imprint CCR9 on homing lymphocytes, thus suggesting how ALDH1a2 may be inflammatory in certain autoimmune diseases of the gut (Brown et al., 2023), potentially explaining recent positive impacts of WIN18446 in inflammatory bowel disease models (Seamons et al., 2020). This evidence concerns the gene ALDH1A2 and inflammatory bowel disease.