Collaboration includes a phase 2 clinical trial using microbiome therapeutics funded by the MRC
EnteroBiotix (EBX) – a microbiome therapeutics company – has announced a partnership with Imperial College London (Imperial) to develop microbiome R&D in patients suffering from blood cancer. The collaboration also aims to accelerate systematic research in the new science of the microbiome.
EBX and Imperial are combining to manage a phase 2 investigator-initiated trial, to evaluate how EBX-102 impacts on outcomes of bone marrow transplant patients with blood cancer. The trial, which is funded by the Medical Research Council – forms part of the Microbiota Transplant Prior to Allogeneic Stem Cell Transplantation study, run across six of the UK’s leading blood cancer centres.
The project includes other institutions such as University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, The Royal Marsden, King’s College London, Leeds Teaching Hospitals and University Hospitals Birmingham.
EBX will provide its lead product, EBX-102, contains diverse ecosystems of microbiota obtained from healthy and screened donors, offering a compositionally consistent drug. In addition, EBX manufacturing capabilities include its novel proprietary AMPLA platform that enables rapid preparation of dry powder from hydrated starting material.
The research will also build on Imperial’s successful pilot study – involving the same patient population – which demonstrated preliminary signals trending towards intestinal microbiota transplantation, reducing complications and improving survival.
Professor Julian Marchesi of Imperial College London, explained: “Patients with blood cancers are a group whose gut microbiome is particularly under attack. They often receive strong chemotherapy, which has side effects of mouth ulcers and gut inflammation. Their nutrition might be poor, they receive frequent antibiotics because of their high rate of infections, and many of them end up colonised with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.”
“That latter point in particular can be a problem when patients need a very demanding treatment, like bone marrow transplantation; haematologists are sometimes anxious about offering this or other treatments because patients are at such high risk of getting an infection which is untreatable. So, we are very excited and pleased to be partnering with EnteroBiotix to use its product to manipulate the gut microbiome in these patients,” he concluded.
