Im­age: Colleen Cut­cliffe WHOLE BIO­ME

The boom in mi­cro­bio­me ther­a­peu­tics has el­e­vat­ed the “good” gut bac­te­ria from pro­bi­otics to drug sta­tus, spurring some up­starts backed by promi­nent ven­ture in­vestors to take their ther­a­pies on the high­ly reg­u­lat­ed jour­ney to­ward an FDA ap­proval. But Whole Bio­me wants to go a sep­a­rate di­rec­tion by oc­cu­py­ing the mid­dle ground with what it’s call­ing “med­ical pro­bi­otics.”

“This is ba­si­cal­ly a prod­uct that has phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal grade ef­fi­ca­cy, clin­i­cal ef­fi­ca­cy, but it has es­sen­tial­ly got the safe­ty of a pro­bi­ot­ic,” CEO Colleen Cut­cliffe tells me as the com­pa­ny emerges from stealth mode with $35 mil­lion in Se­ries B cash.

Jim Bullard Whole Bio­me

Cut­cliffe, a vet­er­an of Elan Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, was work­ing at the DNA se­quenc­ing com­pa­ny Pa­cif­ic Bio­sciences when she met her co-founders, Jim Bullard and John Eid. Com­bin­ing their bio­chem­istry, bio­sta­tis­tics and physics back­ground, the trio built a plat­form that com­pares deep se­quenc­ing da­ta from dif­fer­ent pop­u­la­tions, ar­riv­ing at meta­bol­ic maps that sug­gest ex­act­ly which mi­crobes are miss­ing in pa­tients with cer­tain dis­eases.

Se­quoia Cap­i­tal was an ear­ly sup­port­er of the 6-year-old ven­ture, chip­ping in­to the cur­rent round with True Ven­tures, Khosla Ven­tures, Mayo Foun­da­tion, AME Cloud Ven­tures and oth­ers. Roelof Botha is join­ing the board.

John Eid Whole Bio­me

Whole Bio­me plans to com­mer­cial­ize its first off-the-shelf prod­uct, for type 2 di­a­betes, ear­ly next year. Da­ta from sev­er­al re­cent — though un­pub­lished — place­bo-con­trolled clin­i­cal tri­als show that their treat­ment achieved re­duc­tion in A1C and glu­cose spikes on top of the stan­dard met­formin reg­i­men, Cut­cliffe says.

The the­o­ry is that peo­ple with type 2 di­a­betes lack the mi­crobes that are en­tire­ly re­spon­si­ble for me­tab­o­liz­ing fiber, which then trig­gers GLP1 re­sponse for reg­u­lat­ing glu­cose and in­sulin. WBF-011, which Whole Bio­me in­tends to mar­ket as a med­ical food, is de­signed to put ex­act­ly those mi­crobes back.

With 40 staffers and its own man­u­fac­tur­ing op­er­a­tions at its San Fran­cis­co base, the com­pa­ny is al­so ex­plor­ing oth­er prod­ucts for ir­ri­ta­ble bow­el syn­drome and a third, undis­closed in­di­ca­tion.

In a bewildering twist to the long-suffering market for antibiotics — there has actually been a bidding war for an antibiotic company: Tetraphase.

It all started back in March, when the maker of Xerava (an FDA approved therapy for complicated intra-abdominal infections) said it had received an offer from AcelRx for an all-stock deal valued at $14.4 million.

The offer was well-timed. Xerava was approved in 2018, four years after Tetraphase posted its first batch of pivotal trial data, and sales were nowhere near where they needed to be in order for the company to keep its head above water.

Money has never been an issue for Everest Medicines. With an essentially open tab from their founders at C-Bridge Capital, the biotech has gone two and a half years racking up drug after drug, bringing in top exec after top exec, and issuing clinical update after update.

But now other investors want in — and they’re betting big.

Everest is closing its Series C at $310 million. The first $50 million comes from the Jiashan National Economic and Technological Development Zone; the remaining C-2 tranche was led by Janchor Partners, with RA Capital Management and Hillhouse Capital as co-leaders. Decheng Capital, GT Fund, Janus Henderson Investors, Rock Springs Capital, Octagon Investments all joined.

It’s been precisely one year and one day since Neil Woodford froze his once-vaunted fund, and while a global pandemic has recently shielded him from the torrent of headlines, the fallout continues.

Today, the California-based patent licensing firm Acacia Research acquired the fund’s shares for 19 healthcare and biotech companies for $284 million.  Those companies include shares for public and private companies and count some of Woodford’s most prominent bio-bets, such as Theravance Biopharma, Oxford Nanopore and Mereo Biopharma, according to Sky News, which first reported the sale. It won’t include shares for BenevelontAI, the machine learning biotech once valued at $2 billion.

Lonza chairman Albert Baehny took his time headhunting a new CEO for the company, making it absolutely clear he wanted a Big Pharma or biotech CEO with a good long track record in the business for the top spot. In the end, he went with the gold standard, turning to Roche’s ranks to recruit Pierre-Alain Ruffieux for the job.

Ruffieux, a member of the pharma leadership team at Roche, spent close to 5 years at the company. But like a small army of manufacturing execs, he gained much of his experience at the other Big Pharma in Basel, remaining at Novartis for 12 years before expanding his horizons.

Another Big Pharma is entering the Covid-19 antibody hunt.

AbbVie has announced a collaboration with the Netherlands’ Utrecht University and Erasmus Medical Center and the Chinese-Dutch biotech Harbour Biomed to develop a neutralizing antibody that can treat Covid-19. The antibody, called 47D11, was discovered by AbbVie’s three partners, and AbbVie will support early preclinical work, while preparing for later preclinical and clinical development. Researchers described the antibody in Nature Communications last month.