Bio-therapeutics startup focused on developing therapies for food allergies
October 22, 2018 11:36 AM Eastern Daylight Time
BOSTON & SAN DIEGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ConsortiaTX, Inc., a bio-therapeutics startup developing and commercializing microbial therapies to prevent and treat human disease and allergies, has signed an agreement with Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) and Boston Children’s Hospital for an exclusive, worldwide license for foundational intellectual property related to CTX-944, ConsortiaTX’s proposed microbial therapy for food allergies.
“This license means that ConsortiaTX has the scientific foundation to bring CTX-944, a first-in-kind allergen-independent therapeutic, into the clinic,” said Lynn Bry, M.D., Ph.D., an Associate Medical Director at BWH and a company founder who chairs the ConsortiaTX scientific advisory board (SAB). “My colleagues and I have been working on clinical applications of immunomodulatory microbes for a long time and it’s gratifying to see real progress.”
About 50 million Americans are allergic to one or more foods, with peanuts, milk, eggs, tree nuts, wheat, soy, fish and shellfish being among the most common. The prevalence of food allergies in children has risen rapidly in the past 15 years to more than six million children under the age of 18.* ConsortiaTX is developing therapies for food allergies based on bacteria found in the human gut microbiome.
These therapies emerged from research laboratories at BWH and Boston Children’s Hospital, and are based on evidence-based studies from the Massachusetts Host Microbiome Center (MHMC). The MHMC works actively with academic, non-profit and industry partners investigating the role of the microbiota in health and disease. With funding from The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), BWH and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center (MLSC), the MHMC offers platforms and expertise in anaerobic microbiology, gnotobiotic and high-throughput molecular systems, recruitment of clinical cohorts for evaluation of microbiome-based therapeutics and novel machine learning algorithms to identify causal effects of the microbiota in vivo.
“We’re less than a year old but we’ve made a great deal of progress,” said ConsortiaTX CEO Kent Smith. “Since the company was founded last June, we’ve put together a talented management team, completed two seed rounds totaling $1.2 million, and hired our first two staff scientists who are now laying the groundwork for our Investigational New Drug Application (IND). Over the next two years, we’ll focus on optimizing our science while we continue to communicate with the VC community with our development plan and its incredible potential.”
About ConsortiaTX, Inc.
ConsortiaTX, Inc. is a biotherapeutic company developing therapies based on microbes and microbial products to prevent and treat human diseases. The company was formed in June of 2017 based on the research of Lynn Bry, M.D., Ph.D., Talal Chatila, M.D., and Georg Gerber M.D., Ph.D. The company’s initial therapeutic candidate, CTX-944, targets gut and immune pathways in food allergic patients to reverse allergy-promoting reactions to common food allergens, such as peanuts, milk and shellfish. www.consortiatx.com
*source: www.foodallergy.org/facts-and-stats
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