Only A Week After Bagging AbbVie R&D Deal, Synlogic Raises $40 Million Series B

Only A Week After Bagging AbbVie R&D Deal, Synlogic Raises $40 Milliion Series B
February 17, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

Cambridge, Mass.-based Synlogic announced today that it had closed a Series B investment round worth $40 million. The financing was led by OrbiMed HealthCare Fund Management and was joined by Deerfield Management Company and founding investors Atlas Venture and New Enterprise Associates (NEA).

Run by former Pfizer, Inc. executive Jose-Carlos (JC) Gutierrez-Ramos, Biologic's technology is built on the research of Jim Collins at Boston University and Tim Lu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The initial funding was $35 million from Atlas Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Synlogic’s approach is in synthetic biology, attempting to engineer bacteria to produce a byproduct. The bacteria would be loaded into a capsule and ingested, where the bacteria’s byproducts would go to work.

“Our company has a clear focus on one, therapeutics, and two, non-somatic microorganisms as vectors for therapy,” Gutierrez-Ramos told BioSpace last May. “Both Atlas’ Barret and NEA’s Mathers are very supportive and visionary. Most importantly, Atlas’ Mahadevia assembled a great team.”

Now that the company has raised about $70 million, it intends to use the money to drive its first two programs into the clinic. The company’s focus is on rare metabolic diseases. The first is phenylketonuria, a disorder that results in a buildup of the amino acid phenylalanine, and urea cycle disorders, which affects how the body disposes of waste products.

On Feb. 10, Synlogic announced it had signed a multi-year worldwide research and development collaboration deal with Chicago-based AbbVie . The companies will use Synlogic’s tech program to develop a new class of synthetic medicines to treat inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

“Synlogic’s innovative approach to targeting the microbiome offers a new way to address inflammatory bowel disease,” said Jim Sullivan, AbbVie’s vice president, pharmaceutical discovery, in a statement. “AbbVie is committed to collaborating with scientific leaders with new technologies and therapeutic advances that complement AbbVie’s internal expertise and share our commitment to advancing the standard of care for patients.”

“Synlogic is at the intersection of two exciting areas of science—applying synthetic biology techniques to engineer microbes to act as therapeutics,” said Ed Mathers, a partner with NEA, in an interview with Forbes. “Best part here is that the microbes are harmless unless they encounter the ‘quote/unquote’ toxin at which point a switch turns them on to act! Simplistic, but elegant.”

The company hopes to move its lead drug candidates into human clinical trials in the first quarter of 2017.

In addition, Chau Khuong, a Private Equity Partner with OrbiMed, joins Synlogic’s board of directors. “OrbiMed is delighted to lead this financing of Synlogic,” Khuong said in a statement, “a pioneering company at the convergence of synthetic biology and the microbiome. Synlogic’s approach of developing ‘designer’ probiotics through precision molecular programming to treat human disease is exciting and has the potential to revolutionize the treatment paradigm for a number of medical conditions.”

According to Xconomy, Collins thought the technology he was working on would be used to create diagnostic tests or treatments for infectious diseases. But the venture firms supporting the company pushed toward rare genetic metabolic disorders. The advantages are high medical need, and the clinical trials would be relatively inexpensive and small.

Which brings up a potential complication—regulatory hurdles. ‘Gutierrez-Ramos told Xconomy, “Clearly [these drugs] will have a different type of regulatory scrutiny—and they should.”

The company is using several approaches to systematically deal with those potential regulatory issues. The first is to use probiotic bacteria that already exist in the human body. Then the genes they are inserting or manipulating either are human genes or ones that already exist in bacteria in the microbiome. And finally, the bacteria they use will only survive for a limited timespan, instead of colonizing the gut.

“This is the armamentarium that we will take in [to discussions with regulators],” Gutierrez-Ramos told Xconomy, also adding that the results of meetings with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulators will be a “very important milestone” for Synlogic.

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