AbbVie has entered into a collaboration with Enterome Bioscience, a gut microbiome-focused drug development company, to generate novel diagnostic products to support personalized therapies for microbiome-related diseases. The firms will initially focus on developing noninvasive tools to monitor the gut microbiome in Crohn’s disease.
This collaboration will be anchored around Enterome’s metagenomic biomarker portfolio and technologies. The firms say they complement each other well, as Enterome has expertise in the microbiome space and AbbVie has experience in tackling inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
Enterome CEO Pierre Belichard said in a statement that developing a new treatment paradigm for IBD depends on the kind of tight control that one can only achieve via routine disease activity measurement, allowing physicians to prevent symptomatic relapse through early intervention and avoid the overuse of therapeutics. He added, “The ability to accurately analyze changes in the gut microbiome provides an ideal solution for the routine monitoring of IBD and other important diseases. . . . With this leading technology, we intend to grasp the substantial opportunity the microbiome provides to develop more-effective therapeutic approaches for a broad range of important diseases.”
Enterome's technologies have caught the attention of other organizations, too: In June, it entered an agreement with Synthetic Biologics to conduct metagenomic research on the effects of beta-lactam antibiotics on the gut microbiome of human patients. A week later, it partnered with the Mayo Clinic in a collaboration focused on discovering and validating gut microbiome-based diagnostic tests for predicting response to medical nutritional intervention in obese or overweight patients.
