Cambridge Innovation Capital portfolio company, Microbiotica, has entered into a multi-year strategic collaboration to discover, develop and commercialise biomarkers, targets and medicines for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) with Genentech.
Partnership
The deal, which is worth up to $534 million, will see Microbiotia use its precision metagenomics microbiome platform to analyse patient samples from clinical trials of Genentech’s investigational IBD medicines, to identify microbiome biomarker signatures of drug response, novel IBD targets, and live bacterial therapeutic products.
“From our first meeting with the Microbiotica team we became aware of the tremendous potential in its technology and knowledge base,” commented Dr Robert Tansley, operating partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital. “This collaboration with Genentech, a world-leading biotechnology company, in just one of the many areas of application of the microbiome provides an excellent endorsement of Microbiotica’s technology and underlines CIC’s initial and continual rationale for supporting this business.”
“This collaboration brings together a world-class pipeline of investigational IBD medicines from Genentech with the world-class microbiome capability of Microbiotica,” said Dr Mike Romanos, CEO of Microbiotica. “We are excited by the opportunity to work with Genentech scientists in order to bring precision metagenomics into the clinical arena for the first time, enabling us to develop biomarkers and medicines for the benefit of patients.
“This collaboration reflects Microbiotica’s strategy of utilising its platform for medicines and biomarker discovery while simultaneously expanding capabilities. Whilst Genentech will retain rights to proprietary biomarkers, targets and medicines, the collaboration will enable Microbiotica to continue to rapidly expand its already leading Reference Genome Database and Culture Collection, further strengthening its value across all therapeutic areas.”
Dr James Sabry, PhD, senior vice president and global head of Genentech Partnering, added: “We believe that the microbiome represents a new paradigm in biomedicine both for understanding drug-response and as a novel therapeutic modality. We have chosen to collaborate with Microbiotica because of its high-quality science, and look forward to working together closely to potentially bring new medicines to people suffering from IBD.”
Microbiotica will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible to receive research, development and commercialisation milestone payments up to $534 million based on achievement of certain predetermined milestones. In addition, Microbiotica is eligible to receive royalties on sales of certain products resulting from the collaboration. Genentech also has an option to license assets that Microbiotica develops as a result of the research collaboration.
Microbiotica is based at the Wellcome Genome Campus in Cambridge, UK, with offices in the Biodata Innovation Centre and laboratories in the Sanger Institute.