Massachusetts-based Kaleido Biosciences has brought in $101 million in Series C funding to advance its microbiome-targeting therapeutic pipeline. New investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Fidelity Management and Research Company, Invus and Rock Springs Capital joined original funder Flagship Pioneering.
The group is supporting Kaleido’s efforts to control disease by influencing microbial metabolites. The company feels this could be a more fertile approach than inserting or removing specific microbes.
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“We think about the microbiome as a single organ,” said President and COO Alison Lawton in a phone interview. “And that single organ pumps out different metabolites. Our chemistries are targeted at the function of the organ and its output.”
Those chemistries – which Kaleido calls microbiome metabolic therapies (MMTs) – are built on the microbiome’s unique ability to break down glycans.
“The body itself has 17 different types of glycosylators that break down these types of chemistries,” said Lawton. “The microbiome has 3,000.”
This differential offers Kaleido a large window to develop glycans that microbes love but bodies cannot metabolize. By modulating specific functions, they hope to control disease.
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“We’re not just adding a bug, hoping that one bug will produce the right outcome,” said Lawton. “We’re feeding the entire microbiome and adjusting the metabolic profile of the organ.”
The company has a diverse pipeline, investigating potential therapies for diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, kidney disease and antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Their treatments for hyperammonemia (ammonia in the blood) are the most advanced.
“The microbiome actually makes between 40 to 70 percent of the ammonia in the body,” said Lawton. “Both of these diseases (urea cycle disorders and hepatic encephalopathy) are situations where the liver cannot turn ammonia into urea and excrete it. We’re trying to impact the microbiome to reduce the amount of ammonia that is being made, reducing the amount of ammonia in the body.”
They are taking a different approach against two drug-resistant bacteria – VRE and CRE. Here, their strategy is to create a less hospitable environment for the microbes.
“We use our MMTs to encourage the growth of commensals (good microbes) and those commensals outgrow the pathogens,” said Lawton.
Because their therapies are absorbed by microbes and not people, Kaleido believes their development process will be faster and cheaper. They have conducted seven early-stage trials on their MMTs, though the data has yet to be published, and hope to file INDs for their hyperammonemia therapies later this year. The Series C will fund this development, as well as continued efforts to illuminate the microbiome.
“We are collecting a huge amount of information,” said Lawton. “Through computational science, we want to query that data and learn to identify and develop new chemistries.”
Photo: freedigitalphotos user Salvatore Vuono