Dive Brief:
- Microbiota engineering company Finch Therapeutics Inc and biopharma Crestovo have merged to create a fully-integrated microbiota company.
- The deal will combine Crestovo's clinical stage microbiota product and Finch's commercial-scale manufacturing capabilities, discovery platform and product pipeline.
- Finch Therapeutics Group will be located at Finch's headquarters at Somerville, Mass., and the CEO of the new company will be Finch's president and CEO Mark Smith. Crestovo's current COO and interim CEO, Joseph Lobacki, will step into the role of COO.
Dive Insight:
The gut microbiota, which includes over a thousand different species, is an increasing focus for research into therapeutics for gastrointestinal disorders, and may even be useful for diseases beyond the digestive tract.
Once the deal is closed, Finch Therapeutics Group's pipeline will be headed up by CP101's Full-Spectrum Microbiota product containing microbiota harvested from healthy human donors. This has potential to be a "first-in-class" treatment for recurrent Clostridium difficile infection. The encapsulated oral biotherapeutic is currently in a 240-patient, placebo-controlled trial known as PRISM-3.
The agreement also brings Finch's manufacturing facility, home to one of the world's largest stool donation programs, which already delivers microbiota-based treatments to thousands of patients each year. Finch's machine-learning platform can reverse engineer clinical and molecular data to develop what the company describes as Rationally-Selected Microbiota products
Finch Therapeutics named after Darwin's finches and their role in evolutionary biology, was previously known as NextBiome Inc. The company has had a busy year. In February, Finch signed a collaboration with the public stool bank OpenBiome to develop FIN-403, an orally administered microbial therapy for recurrent Clostridium difficile infections.
Finch also signed up to a partnership with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited in April, to jointly develop FIN-524, a live biotherapeutic in preclinical research with potential in gastrointestinal disease, such as inflammatory bowel disease. This product, which is a collection of microbes grown in pure culture, uses Finch's Rationally-Selected Microbiota platform.