Firm’s lead programs target nonalcoholic fatty liver and inflammatory bowel diseases.
French firm Enterome raised €5 million in a series A financing round co-led by Seventure Partners and Lundbeckfond Ventures. Seventure was one of the investors in Enterome’s prior €1.5 million seed financing round. The Paris-based firm is developing biomarkers and drugs for diseases that feature abnormal gut flora composition, including NASH (nonalcoholic steatohepatitis), type 2 diabetes, obesity, and inflammatory bowel disorders such as Crohn disease and ulcerative colitis. Lead programs are in the fields of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and inflammatory bowel diseases.
Funds from the Series A round will be used primarily to validate Enterome’s biomarkers and commercialize them as laboratory-developed diagnostic services in the U.S. and EU. The firm also plans to set up collaborations with the pharmaceutical and nutrition industries.
The gut flora technology was initially developed at the INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) by Enterome’s scientific founder Dusko Ehrlich, who also heads the European metaHIT consortium. “We are particularly pleased to see one of our main research assets being translated into a company and financed by an international group of intestors,” comments Gerard Jacquin, president of the INRA’s technology transfer arm, INRA Transfert, which participated with Seventure in Enterome’s seed funding round. “Enterome is a key element in our Metagenopolis organization, a center for excellence in metagenomics of the human gut microbiota developed at INRA.”
Enterome claims it has developed one of the most advanced and clinically validated biomarker platforms to study the role of gut microbiota in health and disease. The firm’s founders have identified and patented biomarkers originating from metagenomic signatures that are associated with disease progression or predicting drug efficacy. Enterome aims to develop diagnostic and therapeutic candidates as well as combined treatment-companion diagnostic combinations.
