Har­ness­ing da­ta gath­ered as part of the Na­tion­al In­sti­tutes of Health (NIH) Hu­man Mi­cro­bio­me Pro­ject, the co-ed­i­tor-in-chief of the jour­nal Mi­cro­bio­me, Jacques Rav­el, has formed a biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny fo­cused on women’s health.

The com­pa­ny, chris­tened Lu­ca Bi­o­log­ics, has leaned on 15 years of Rav­el’s vagi­nal mi­cro­bio­me re­search to de­vel­op a pipeline of ther­a­peu­tics de­signed to treat uri­nary tract in­fec­tions (UTI), preterm birth and bac­te­r­i­al vagi­nosis.

The WHO es­ti­mates that UTIs im­pact half of all women, and is the most com­mon bac­te­r­i­al in­fec­tion in the Unit­ed States. An­tibi­otics are the first and on­ly line of de­fense, but drug re­sis­tance has bur­geoned and su­per­bugs are all-per­va­sive. But the path to an­tibi­ot­ic ap­proval is long, ar­du­ous and ex­pen­sive — it of­fers lit­tle fi­nan­cial gain as treat­ments must be priced cheap­ly, and of­ten lose po­ten­cy over time as mi­crobes grow re­sis­tant to them. Mean­while, doc­tors pre­fer to use old­er, in­fi­nite­ly cheap­er an­tibi­otics in their first re­sponse, re­serv­ing fresh al­ter­na­tives for acute cas­es. Con­se­quent­ly, there has been no new class of an­tibi­otics ap­proved since the 1980s — and to­day, rough­ly 700,000 deaths an­nu­al­ly are at­trib­uted to drug-re­sis­tant bac­te­ria, ac­cord­ing to the WHO. Mean­while, the in­dus­try play­ers con­tribut­ing to the ar­se­nal of an­timi­cro­bials are fast dwin­dling as fee­ble sales frus­trate growth.

How­ev­er, last month the FDA sanc­tioned the ap­proval of Mer­ck’s $MRK com­bi­na­tion an­tibac­te­r­i­al for the treat­ment of com­pli­cat­ed uri­nary tract and in­tra-ab­dom­i­nal in­fec­tions.

Lu­ca’s mi­cro­bio­me-de­rived UTI tri­al is ex­pect­ed to be­gin en­rolling pa­tients this fall.

Lu­ca’s pipeline emerged from a vagi­nal mi­cro­bio­ta li­brary of 1,000+ strains and gene cat­a­log as­sem­bled by a re­search group led by Rav­el and fund­ed by the NIH and the Bill and Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion. That da­ta were screened to iso­late genes that main­tain and pro­tect the sta­bil­i­ty of vagi­nal com­mu­ni­ties over time — and those in­sights were used to de­vel­op ex­per­i­men­tal com­pounds.

“While our re­search start­ed with metage­nom­ic se­quenc­ing to gen­er­ate large com­par­a­tive da­ta sets, we can now trans­late our find­ings in­to safe and ef­fec­tive treat­ments for wide­spread con­di­tions that stig­ma­tize and dev­as­tate mil­lions of women each year,” Rav­el said in a state­ment.

George Church Har­vard

Mi­cro­bial sci­ences com­pa­ny Seed Health, which counts Har­vard ge­neti­cist George Church and Rav­el on its sci­en­tif­ic ad­vi­so­ry board, spawned Lu­ca as part of its mis­sion to de­vel­op mi­cro­bial ther­a­pies for con­di­tions that are un­der­served by cur­rent stan­dard-of-care. Seed Health part­ners with sci­en­tists to pro­vide cap­i­tal in­vest­ment, reg­u­la­to­ry and IP guid­ance, bio-fer­men­ta­tion scale-up, and as­sis­tance with clin­i­cal tri­als through its aca­d­e­m­ic part­ner­ships.

Mi­cro­bio­me-based ther­a­peu­tics to­day is a fe­cund field for drug de­vel­op­ers — big and small — cap­i­tal­iz­ing on sci­ence that sug­gests flush­ing ‘good’ gut bac­te­ria in­to the sys­tem can treat a pletho­ra of con­di­tions — from C. diff in­fec­tions to obe­si­ty — us­ing dif­fer­ent ther­a­peu­tic modal­i­ties, some of which are de­signed to side­step the “ick” fac­tor as­so­ci­at­ed with tra­di­tion­al stool trans­fer or fe­cal mi­cro­bio­ta trans­plan­ta­tion (FMT).

Otonomy may be shutting down, but the lessons learned there will live on at another biotech working on new treatments for hearing loss.

San Francisco-based Spiral Therapeutics has bought certain assets related to three of Otonomy’s programs, ranging from data, patent rights, and know-how to inventory. That includes data around Otonomy’s twice-failed lead program, OTO-104 (Otividex), a sustained-exposure formulation of dexamethasone.

Paul McKenzie took over as CEO of Australian pharma giant CSL this month, following in the footsteps of long-time CSL vet Paul Perreault.

With an eye on mRNA, and quickly commercializing its new, $3.5 million-per-shot gene therapy for hemophilia B, McKenzie and chief medical officer Bill Mezzanotte answered some questions from Endpoints News this afternoon about where McKenzie is going to take the company and what advances may be coming to market from CSL’s pipeline. Below is a lightly edited transcript.

Boehringer Ingelheim reported human pharma sales of €18.5 billion on Wednesday, led by type 2 diabetes and heart failure drug Jardiance and pulmonary fibrosis med Ofev. Jardiance sales reached €5.8 billion, growing 39% year over year, while Ofev took in €3.2 billion, notching its own 20.6% annual jump.

However, Boehringer is also looking ahead with its pipeline, estimating “In the next seven years the company expects about 20 regulatory approvals in human pharma.”