Israeli drug discovery company BiomX has acquired fellow Israeli microbiome company RondiX. Founded in 2015, BiomX raised $24 million in May even before it graduated from the FutuRX biotechnology incubator in Ness Ziona operated by OrbiMed, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson. No financial details about the acquisition were disclosed, however, in parallel to the merger announcement, San Francisco-based 8VC, an angel investor in RondinX, made an undisclosed equity investment in BiomX.
The acquisition by biomX, which develops customized phage therapies, strengthens its bacterial target discovery capabilities and supports its product development pipeline. Through the acquisition, BiomX will also expand its therapeutic pipeline with novel microbial targets for a chronic liver disease.
BiomX CEO Jonathan Solomon said, "RondinX developed a superior computational platform that provides an accurate picture of the residing bacterial strains present in the microbiome samples of large cohorts of patients as well as their growth dynamics. This merger of capabilities brings BiomX's target discovery capabilities to the forefront of microbiome analysis, and at the same time supports the development of our lead inflammatory bowel disease and cancer products."
RondinX's technology is based on pioneering at the Weizmann Institute of Science and exclusively licensed to RondinX from its commercial arm YEDA Research and Development Company Ltd. In the research, Profs. Eran Segal and Eran Elinav demonstrated the link between certain members of the microbiome community and specific disease states by incorporating prediction of bacterial growth dynamics into microbiome analysis. The findings were published in Science in 2015.
BiomX is a microbiome drug discovery company developing customized phage therapies that target and destroy harmful bacteria in chronic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer. We discover and validate proprietary bacterial targets and customize our natural and engineered phage compositions against these targets.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 26, 2017
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