This year’s bumper crop of Xconomy Award startup finalists cover a wide range of technologies and approaches, from microbiome and gene therapy to regenerative medicine and emerging areas like chromatin biology. Some are early stage, some are already in the clinic and one even has products on the market. Here are brief profiles of the startup finalists. (To read about the CEO finalists, click here.)
Finch Therapeutics
Finch is one of several human microbiome startups, but its roots are unique. Before starting his company, Finch CEO Mark Smith and his collaborators launched a human stool bank in 2012, called OpenBiome, to collect stool donations, and provide screened and processed fecal material to hospitals for transplantation into patients with Clostridium difficile infection. Smith and his cofounders started Finch Therapeutics in 2014 to try to move beyond these fecal microbiota transplantations (FMT) and come up with rationally designed microbiome therapeutics.
In 2017, Finch merged with another microbiome company Crestovo, which was already testing in humans an orally administered drug containing a wide range of microbes from healthy donors for the treatment of C. difficile infection. The phase 2, 240-patient trial should generate data next year.
Finch brought its manufacturing capability to the merger with Crestovo. That capability is already proven: Finch makes OpenBiome’s FMT treatments, about a thousand each month.
This manufacturing know-how gives Finch the foundation to develop its next wave of designed microbiome therapeutics using clinical data. The company has helped dozens of academic groups do pilot studies of various microbiome treatments that are transplanted into patients from donors. In exchange for manufacturing and other services, Finch gets early access to data from these studies before they are published, or even access to patient and donor samples. Finch analyzes the clinical data or samples, using machine-learning algorithms to identify specific bacterial strains that might be providing important clinical benefits.
This “human-first” approach has led to a microbial cocktail, developed in partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical, for ulcerative colitis that is moving toward human testing.
Foghorn Therapeutics
Foghorn is pursuing a new type of drug target in cancer: the genes that control how DNA is packaged inside the cell’s nucleus. The tightly packed web of DNA and proteins in the cell is called chromatin. The cell tweaks chromatin’s structure, opening up certain parts and making specific genes accessible so that they can be used to make proteins. Changing chromatin’s structure is another way the cell regulates which genes get turned on and when. Foghorn’s scientific cofounders, Cigall Kadoch of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (who’s also a finalist the Young Innovator category) and Gerald Crabtree of Stanford, have found that mutations in the system that controls this chromatin remodeling may be involved in up to 20 percent of cancers and in other diseases too.
Foghorn wants to find medicines that target the chromatin regulators that go awry in various types of cancer, and has its eye on neurology and immunology too. The company was founded in 2016 and has $50 million in financing from Flagship Pioneering to work on six discovery programs and more earlier stage ones.
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