Microbiotica, a Cambridge, UK-based player in discovering and developing microbiome-based therapeutics and biomarkers, closed a £50m ($67m) Series B financing round.
The round was co-led by Flerie Invest, and Tencent, with participation from new investors British Patient Capital and existing investors Cambridge Innovation Capital, IP Group, and Seventure Partners.
The company intends to use the proceeds to progress its two lead oral Live Bacterial Therapeutics (LBTs), MB097 and MB310 to Phase 1b clinical studies. The funds will also be used to expand Microbiotica’s discovery pipeline of biomarkers and LBTs in new disease areas.
Led by Mike Romanos, Co-Founder and CEO, Microbiotica develops microbiome-based therapeutics, biomarkers and targets. The company is building a pipeline of differentiated products based on high quality clinical datasets and unique bacterial signatures that drive biology, identified by its proprietary platform. The company’s current therapeutic areas of focus are immuno-oncology and IBD and it has established major clinical and academic partnerships in these areas.
MB097 is a fully defined LBT comprising a consortium of bacteria at the core of Microbiotica’s clinical microbiome signature predictive of patient response to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor therapy. MB310 is a fully defined LBT comprising a consortium of bacteria for the treatment of Ulcerative Colitis (UC) identified as being linked to remission in a UC faecal transplant clinical study.
Both MB097 and MB310 are precision medicines derived by accurate clinical microbiome profiling using Microbiotica’s platform which links consortia of bacteria with clinical trial outcome data. Both products have also been validated and mechanistically characterised pre-clinically through in vivo efficacy data and ex vivo human cell data.
Microbiotica, spun out of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, has partnered with organisations, such as Cancer Research UK, Cambridge University Hospitals, University of Adelaide and Genentech.
FinSMEs
07/03/2022