Biomx Ltd., of Ness Ziona, Israel, nabbed its Tel Aviv-based neighbor, Rondinx Ltd., in a private deal designed to strengthen its bacterial target discovery capabilities and support its therapeutic pipeline, adding microbial targets for chronic liver disease.

Although financial terms were not disclosed, San Francisco-based 8VC, an angel investor in Rondinx, made an undisclosed equity investment in the expanded company, extending the $24 million series A financing that Biomx closed in May. That round was led by Orbimed, Johnson & Johnson Innovation-JJDC Inc. and Takeda Ventures Inc. with participation from Seventure Partners, Mirae Asset, SBI Japan-Israel Innovation Fund and other European investors.

The series A and additional investment give Biomx a runway to at least mid-2019, according to Assaf Oron, the company's chief business officer.

The companies already shared Eran Elinav, senior scientist in the immunology department at the Weizmann Institute of Science, as a scientific founder. The Rondinx acquisition also expands the prowess of Biomx in microbiome modulation and supports the development of therapeutic candidates in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and immuno-oncology (I-O).

Since both companies were in Israel's biopharma fishbowl, "we've known about each other and the technology that Rondinx was developing," Oron told BioWorld. "In the last six months, we had more concrete discussions on how we could use the synergies between the companies."

The Rondinx technology platform is based on research conducted at Weizmann by Elinav and Eran Segal, a computational biologist, and exclusively licensed to the company. The findings, published in 2015 in Science, showed a link between certain members of the microbiome community and specific disease states, based on the bacterial strains present in microbiome samples of large cohorts of patients and the application of the company's computational platform to predict their growth trajectory.

The ability to boost its target discovery capabilities represents a competitive advantage for Biomx, which is seeking to demyelinate the microbiome.

"Before you add bacteria or eradicate bacteria in the microbiome, you want to know what to work on," Oron observed, noting that many microbiome-based companies are seeking to characterize bacteria that affect the same diseases of interest, including IBD and liver disease, as well as the performance of I-O drugs. The Rondinx platform enables Biomx to drill into those queries "at high resolution," complementing the company's in-house capabilities to analyze the microbiome. In the end, the goal is to "identify key bacteria for key diseases," Oron said.

Biomx – formerly Mbcure but renamed this year as a play on biomics, or the study of biomes – is developing phage therapies that target many of those pro-inflammatory bacterial diseases.

"We know that there are certain bacteria that are not populated in the gut of healthy people that drive inflammation when people get into the disease state of IBD," Oron said. Although some microbiome companies – he cited Seres Therapeutics Inc. and Vedanta Biosciences Inc. as two examples – are seeking to add bacteria to balance the gut microbiota as a therapeutic strategy, "we're focusing more on the ability to tailor phage therapy to eradicate disease-causing bacteria." (See BioWorld, Feb. 1, 2017, and Dec. 8, 2017.)

In the past year, Rondinx began to apply its platform to the discovery of candidate bacteria to treat liver disease, which is a therapeutic area of interest for Biomx and, Oron conceded, many other biopharmas.

"We were thinking of initiating a liver disease project, so the Rondinx findings fit well and enabled us to jumpstart that project," he said.

'We're getting a lot of interest in the IBD program'

The acquisition and financing position Biomx to advance preclinical asset BX-002, a phage cocktail aimed at eradicating several undisclosed antibiotic-resistant bacteria targets associated with the onset of IBD. Using in vivo models, Biomx showed the ability to induce inflammation and disease in the targets, and BX-002 suggested efficacy and eradication specificity in vitro. Genetic analysis of components of the cocktail showed phage diversity and indicated multiple mechanisms to eradicate the target bacteria.

"We're getting a lot of interest in the IBD program," Oron said. The company plans to file an IND in 2019.

Biomx also is working on an acne program that is expected to advance into the clinic next year.

The other scientific founders at Biomx include Rotem Sorek, who leads the microbial genomics group in Weizmann's department of molecular genetics, where he specializes in phage genomics and CRISPR research, and Timothy Lu, associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the synthetic biology group in the department of electrical engineering and computer science and the department of biological engineering.

CEO Jonathan Solomon was previously co-founder, president and CEO of Proclara Biosciences (formerly Neurophage Pharmaceuticals Inc.), which raised a $47 million series E following its rebranding last year to advance lead candidate NPT-088 into a phase Ib trial in Alzheimer's disease. (See BioWorld Today, Sept. 8, 2016.)

Naomi Zak, president and chief operating officer, served in research and regulatory positions at companies such as Chiasma Inc., Cell Cure Neurosciences Ltd. (a unit of Biotime) and now-defunct Idgene Pharmaceuticals Ltd. Prior to joining Biomx this year, Oron was an executive at Evogene Ltd., an Israeli agriculture biotechnology company.

Founded in 2015, Biomx is pursuing an approach that combines the right ingredients at the right time, Oron said.

"There's much more understanding and openness to phage today than there was in previous years," he said, referring, for instance, to the two-day public workshop in July on scientific and regulatory issues in bacteriophage therapy sponsored by the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the NIH. With antibiotic resistance escalating to "crisis-level proportions," CBER Director Peter Marks said in his opening remarks, "bacteriophage may turn out to be important therapeutics."

The investigation of potential phage therapies "has seen a renaissance globally," Marks added.

"Phage have the benefit that their bacterial specificity allows sparing of the remainder of the beneficial microbiota," he said, with investigational efforts so far showing that phage is nontoxic in humans and animals.

In addition to a more favorable stance by the FDA, big biopharmas active in the microbiome field appear more receptive to phage therapies, according to Oron.

"Companies are seeing the necessity for this," he said. "People know that antibiotics are not going to be a solution for many of the modifying microbiome therapies."

Given its three-tiered platform of target discovery, microbiome modulation and product development, Biomx aims to build an independent company, with opportunities to collaborate along the way.

"Some of the multinationals have some capabilities to pursue things more aggressively than we can on our own, so we do see assets in our pipeline that might lend themselves potentially to licensing or partnering," Oron said. "We're discussing several of those opportunities now."