PureTech Health plc, a cross-disciplinary healthcare company tackling
fundamental healthcare needs, is pleased to note that Commense
(co-founded by PureTech Health), has advanced its discovery and
development platform, named its founding scientists and advisors and
executed an exclusive license in the microbiome field.
Commense,
pioneering a deep understanding of the microbiome early in life and its
fundamental role in promoting a lifetime of health, expands on
PureTech’s focus on the microbiome, including PureTech’s Vedanta
Biosciences, which is developing a novel class of therapies designed to
modulate pathways of interaction between the human microbiome and the
host immune system.
Daphne Zohar, CEO of PureTech said: “We are
excited to build on our knowledge and network of experts in the
microbiome field. Commense is developing new microbial-derived therapies
targeting the formative years of life, a time when the microbiome plays
a crucial role.”
“A child’s early interactions with microbes
can play an essential role in health and are believed to impact the
later development of serious conditions such as asthma, food allergies,
type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis,” said David Steinberg,
co-founder of Commense and executive VP at PureTech. “We are pleased to
advance our work in the early childhood microbiome with the expansion of
our pipeline and the addition of an esteemed group of advisors.”
Commense’s
work builds on the decades of data supporting the “hygiene hypothesis,”
which suggests that a lack of early childhood exposure to key microbes
increases the risk of numerous early childhood diseases common in
developed countries. Commense is developing a pipeline of novel
therapeutics for the prevention and treatment of disease based on a deep
understanding of these human/microbe interactions and their impact on
health. Supporting this pipeline is Commense’s platform to characterise
and design microbiome-based therapeutics to potentially restore these
“missing microbes,” along with a suite of technologies designed to
improve measurement and diagnosis, delivery and microbial colonisation.
Commense
has obtained an exclusive, worldwide license from New York University
on a key building block of its platform, an approach focused on
replenishing and bolstering the microbial exposure that a baby
experiences at birth during passage through the birth canal. This
technology is designed to enable microbial transfer in newborns who may
not receive the vaginal microbiome, including those delivered by
caesarean section (C-section).
“Until very recently, every
surviving mammal has been delivered through the birth canal. In
C-sections, the lack of the protective microbes with which we've
co-evolved could be very important for many conditions, including
diabetes, asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease, that we now
know involve the microbiome,” said Dr. Rob Knight, a coauthor of the
Nature Medicine study, and a member of Commense’s Scientific Advisory
Board.
The study demonstrated that vaginal microbial transfer
could be performed to seed newborns delivered by C-section with microbes
derived from the mother’s birth canal, in a procedure mimicking natural
birth. This procedure enhanced the levels of potentially beneficial
microbes throughout the 30-day follow-up period. Commense is extending
this approach by developing microbial and non-microbial interventions
that could benefit millions of children each year worldwide.
“These
extremely exciting initial data give promise to the hope that all
newborns might receive the potential health advantages of their mothers’
beneficial microbes, in a manner reminiscent of the now-established
benefits of faecal microbial transfers for C. difficile infections,”
said Dr. Dominguez-Bello. “We’ve been overwhelmed by the support and
positive response to the study by mothers, physicians, and researchers.”