Seres Health has raised $10 million to advance its C.difficile therapeutic to treat strains resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin, according to a company statement. It wants to combat the increasing threat hospital acquired infections pose to patients. But this innovative approach to medicine also faces some regulatory challenges.
The Mayo Clinic was among the new investors participating in the Series B round, which also included Alexandria Venture Investments, a subsidiary of Alexandria Real Estate Equities and angel investors.
The focus of Seres Health’s technology is microbiome therapeutics and developing treatments that restore balance between good and bad bacteria in each person’s microbial environment to treat infectious, metabolic and inflammatory diseases. The Mayo Clinic’s Center for Individualized Medicine will collaborate with Seres to determine which diseases would benefit the most from a microbiome-based intervention. Through the collaboration with Seres, Mayo will offer microbiome-based therapies on a trial basis for patients who don’t respond to traditional treatments.
The level of interest in the microbiome has been compared to genomics. It’s a an area of growing investment as scientists increasingly see connections between microbes and a wide range of conditions. Other biotech companies in the microbiome space include Second Genome and uBiome. Second Genome CEO Peter DiLaura takes the view that biological reactions between the microbiome and the individuals can either be inhibited or activated to help people recover from certain diseases, according to an article from Wharton Business School.
Although the area of microbiomes is an exciting area of biotechnology, these treatments will also pose a challenge to FDA approval because it is such a new field. Gary Wu, a gastroenterology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, noted in the article that the biggest quandry will be how to define these treatments. Will they be defined as a biologic or a chemically based drug or some combination of the two?
“There are many questions that I think the FDA and other regulatory agencies still haven’t answered for themselves, he said. “So any company that’s working in this space has to work collectively with the FDA to define the pathway forward.”
