The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Federation Bio announced a strategic collaboration to design and manufacture a complex, synthetic microbial consortium with the goal of expanding the number of cancer patients who respond to immunotherapy. The agreement pairs Federation Bio’s proprietary ACT (anerobic co-culture technology) platform with the expertise and capabilities of MD Anderson’s Platform for Innovative Microbiome and Translational Research (PRIME-TR).
Under the agreement, MD Anderson and Federation Bio intend to rationally design a complex consortium of bacteria derived from a donor fecal sample that has a demonstrated ability to improve immunotherapy responses in cancer patients via FMT in a clinical trial. Federation Bio will use its proprietary ACT platform to manufacture the consortium from purified cell lines, generating a therapy that comprises the full metabolic complexity of the identified microbiome and is optimized for therapeutic benefit.
Federation Bio’s ACT platform enables the production of highly controlled bacterial consortia that have been rationally designed to address a broad range of diseases and disorders. The company already has used the platform to design and manufacture FB-001, an investigational oral therapy consisting of 148 bacterial strains isolated from multiple healthy donors. Federation Bio currently is evaluating FB-001 in a Phase I clinical trial; it is the first rationally designed complex consortium at this scale to enter clinical studies.
PRIME-TR is a novel institutional platform that studies and targets the microbiome at multiple different niches.
