Israeli microbiome company BiomX, which is developing customized phage therapies, has announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Janssen the therapy R&D arm of Johnson & Johnson., The collaboration will utilize Ness Ziona-based BiomX's XMarker microbiome-based biomarker discovery platform, which will be used to stratify responders and non-responders to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) therapeutics.
BiomX CEO Jonathan Solomon said, "The XMarker platform was created for BiomX's microbial target discovery, based on the advanced algorithms developed by our scientific founders and our internal computational team. Beyond target discovery, we believe that our microbiome analytics holds great promise for the development of a new class of biomarkers in major disease areas such as liver disease, cancer and IBD."
There is growing evidence that the composition of the microbiome is a promising predictive tool for disease and for patient response to therapy in conditions such as IBD, cancer and liver disease. BiomX's novel XMarker platform applies a unique metagenomics-based approach to decipher full microbial genomic signatures that can be further developed into predictive biomarkers. The platform combines ultra-high-resolution DNA analysis, machine-learning techniques and high-scale cloud computing resources to build classifiers of high sensitivity and specificity.
BiomX, which has 60 employees, was founded in the FutuRX biotechnology incubator, based on research by professors from the Weizmann Institute of Science and MIT. The company has raised $24 million to date in addition to the assistance it received in the incubator.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 13, 2018
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