MRM Health—a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing next-generation live microbiome consortia therapeutics—announced that its Type-2 Diabetes Program, developed in collaboration with IFF has achieved preclinical development targets.
With the achievement of this new milestone, both companies will now advance this research which focuses on developing innovative therapies for metabolic diseases to the clinical development stage.
IFF joined forces with microbiome specialist MRM Health in 2020, aiming to tackle a range of metabolic diseases. In this research, the proprietary MRM Health CORAL® technology platform and some selected IFF strains will be combined to develop novel therapeutics based on live bacterial strain combinations.
“We are very pleased to see the progress that MRM Health and IFF have made within our partnership programs in metabolic health,” said Oliver Hasselwander, technical fellow, IFF. “By reaching this preclinical milestone in the diabetes program, MRM Health has further demonstrated that their technology platform is unique in identifying next generation microbiome solutions, and we look forward to developing these together with MRM Health.”
The gut microbiome has a recognized role in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and associated diseases such as Type-2 diabetes and obesity. The two companies will continue the NAFLD program to further build on promising lead consortia. IFF and MRM Health’s collaboration on NAFLD will enable both parties to build upon the preclinical results, showing that a nine-strain bacterial consortium delays NAFLD progression and liver fibrosis. Part of this work was recently published in Biomedicines.
“This second milestone achievement is an important step in demonstrating our team’s expertise and the capacity of our unique CORAL® platform to deliver differentiated microbiome therapeutics across different diseases,” said Sam Possemiers, CEO and co-founder of MRM Health. “We are delighted to be working with IFF to rapidly drive the program through this preclinical phase, and we are confident that our technologies have the potential to deliver future life-changing oral therapeutics for patients.”
MRM Health’s CORAL® platform utilizes a bioinformatics-guided in-human discovery engine, combined with a breakthrough in optimization and manufacturing of consortia as single drug substance.
The proprietary consortia optimization technology allows for the development of next-generation consortia therapeutics with faster onset-of-action and increased potency and robustness. The breakthrough scalable, robust, and standardized cGMP-compliant consortia manufacturing technology allows to manufacture complete therapeutic consortia as a single drug substance in a single manufacturing process which strongly surpasses existing approaches in speed, reduced complexity, increased robustness and lower cost.
