CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vedanta Biosciences, pioneering the development of a novel class of therapies for immune and infectious diseases based on rationally designed consortia of bacteria derived from the human microbiome, today announced that it has entered into translational medicine collaborations with Stanford University School of Medicine and Leiden University Medical Center. The relationships will focus on food allergies in children and on patients with C. difficile infection or graft-versus-host disease, respectively.
Both collaborations seek to better understand patterns in the microbiome that may potentially inform clinical responses to therapy. Under the terms of the agreement with Stanford, Vedanta will work in collaboration with Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD, Director of the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research at Stanford University, to analyze the potential connection between the gut microbiome and responses to oral immunotherapies in children with food allergies. With Leiden University, Vedanta will generate clinical data from interventional studies of fecal transplantation in C. difficile patients treated with donors from the Netherlands Donor Feces Bank, as well as clinical data from patients with graft-versus-host disease, in collaboration with Ed Kuijper, MD, PhD, Professor of Medical Microbiology at the Leiden University Medical Center and co-chair of the Netherlands Donor Feces Bank. The clinical data will feed into Vedanta’s leading platform for discovery, development, and GMP manufacturing of rationally designed bacterial consortia drugs.
“We’re excited to announce our relationships with Stanford and Leiden University,” said Bruce Roberts, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Vedanta Biosciences. “Collaborations with leading academic centers are an important part of our strategy to support our drug development efforts with human data and with careful science.”
About Vedanta Biosciences
Vedanta
Biosciences is pioneering development of a novel class of therapies
for immune and infectious diseases based on rationally designed
consortia of bacteria derived from the human microbiome, with clinical
trials expected to begin in the first half of 2017. Founded by PureTech
Health (PureTech Health plc, PRTC.L) and a group of world-renowned
experts in immunology and microbiology, Vedanta Biosciences is a leader
in the microbiome field with capabilities to discover, develop and
manufacture drugs based on live bacterial consortia. Leveraging its
proprietary technology platform and the expertise of its team of
scientific co-founders, Vedanta Biosciences has isolated a vast
collection of human-associated bacterial strains and characterized how
the immune system recognizes and responds to these microbes. This work
has led to the identification of human commensal bacteria that induce a
range of immune responses – including induction of regulatory T cells
and Th17 cells, among others – as well as the characterization of novel
molecular mechanisms of microbial-host communication. These advances
have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals including Science,
Nature
(multiple),
Cell
and Nature
Immunology. Vedanta Biosciences has harnessed these
biological insights as well as data from clinical translational
collaborations to generate a pipeline of programs in development for
infectious disease, autoimmune disease, inflammation and
immune-oncology. The clinical potential of therapeutic manipulation of
the microbiome has been validated by multiple randomized, controlled
trials in infectious disease and inflammatory bowel disease.
Vedanta Biosciences’ scientific co-founders have pioneered the fields of innate immunity, Th17 and regulatory T cell biology, and include Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov (Professor of Immunobiology at Yale), Dr. Alexander Rudensky (tri-institutional Professor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, the Rockefeller University and Cornell University), Dr. Dan Littman (Professor of Molecular Immunology at NYU), Dr. Brett Finlay (Professor at the University of British Columbia) and Dr. Kenya Honda (Professor, School of Medicine, Keio University). Vedanta is backed by PureTech Health, Seventure, Invesco Asset Management, and Rock Springs Capital.
Forward Looking Statement
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but not limited to, those risks and uncertainties described in the risk
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