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.

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