LONDON, UK: IP Group plc (LSE: IPO) portfolio company Microbiotica Ltd, a leading player in discovering and developing microbiome-based therapeutics and biomarkers, has completed its £50m Series B financing round, the largest microbiome-related financing in Europe to date.
The financing round was also supported by new investors Flerie Invest, Tencent and British Patient Capital as well as existing investors IP Group, Cambridge Innovation Capital and Seventure Partners.
The proceeds will be used to progress Microbiotica’s two lead oral Live Bacterial Therapeutics (LBTs), MB097 and MB310, to Phase 1b clinical studies as well as to expand its discovery pipeline of biomarkers and LBTs in new disease areas.
IP Group committed £4m to the funding round and, following completion, has an undiluted beneficial holding of 18.2% in Microbiotica, valued at £16.1m. IP Group has recorded a net unrealised fair value gain of £2.2m.
Dr Sam Williams, Managing Partner of Life Sciences at IP Group plc, said: “As a founding investor in Microbiotica, our thesis was that, by culturing, characterising and stratifying the human microbiome, Microbiotica would be able to identify live biotherapeutics with the greatest chance of clinical success in the microbiome field. The company’s pre-clinical data suggest that, so far, our thesis is proving correct, and we are delighted that the company’s esteemed new investors are joining us for the next leg of this exciting journey.”
Microbiotica, spun out of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, has taken microbiome analysis and patient stratification from clinical data to a new level of precision, and translates this into new therapeutics and biomarkers. The company’s proprietary technology is based on comprehensive gut bacterial isolation, its leading database of gut bacterial reference genomes and advanced bioinformatic and machine learning tools. Microbiotica has partnered with leading organisations, such as Cancer Research UK, Cambridge University Hospitals, University of Adelaide and Genentech.
MB097 is a fully defined LBT comprising a consortium of bacteria at the core of Microbiotica’s clinical microbiome signature predictive of patient response to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor therapy. MB310 is a fully defined LBT comprising a consortium of bacteria for the treatment of Ulcerative Colitis (UC) identified as being linked to remission in a UC faecal transplant clinical study.
Both MB097 and MB310 are precision medicines derived by highly accurate clinical microbiome profiling using Microbiotica’s platform which links consortia of bacteria with clinical trial outcome data. Both products have also been validated and mechanistically characterised pre-clinically through in vivo efficacy data and ex vivo human cell data.
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