The gut microbiome is crucial to human health. The microbes found in this complex ecosystem perform important functions to keep us healthy. The loss of these microbes leads to a loss in their function and, ultimately, can lead to disease. BiomeBank, a clinical-stage biotechnology company, is on a mission to treat and prevent disease by restoring the gut microbial ecology.
BiomeBank’s donor-derived microbiome therapy, provides an alternative way of treating conditions like C. difficile infection than traditional treatment. With its approval by Australian regulators in 2022, BiomeBank became the first company to gain regulatory approval for a donor-derived microbiome drug product in the world.
BiomeBank’s drug product is a donor-derived microbiome therapy in which gut bacteria and other microbes of a healthy person are transplanted into another, helping restore the functionality of a healthy microbiome.
“BiomeBank’s donor-derived product is approved in Australia for the treatment of C. Difficile infection. However, we see the product’s greatest value as a tool to develop cultured microbiome therapies targeting specific diseases. We are using it in clinical trials where we can correlate positive clinical responses with microbiome data to identify organisms that carry a mechanism of action associated with treating the disease. We pull out those microbes from our large gut bacterial culture collection, and from those develop a cultured version of the therapy.” says CEO Sam Costello.
Equipped with the abundance of data and human gut microbes at their disposal, the team at BiomeBank created Consortiomeâ„¢, a rationally designed microbial platform in which they are able to generate an artificial human gut microbial community in a bioreactor. It contains more than 90% of the known gene families found in a healthy person’s microbiome, providing the ability to deliver highly targeted disease-specific functions. Consortiomeâ„¢ eliminates the reliance on stool donors, enabling…
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