Glaxo Wants to Look Inside Your Gut to Discover New Vaccines

(Bloomberg) -- GlaxoSmithKline Plc is exploring the trillions of microbes that inhabit the gut in pursuit of novel ways to prevent some of the world’s most common ailments.

The U.K. pharma giant is teaming up with Viome, a company backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Salesforce.com Inc. co-founder Marc Benioff, to gain a deeper understanding of the universe of bacteria that dwell in the digestive tract and the role they play in the body’s immune system.

The collaboration is the latest sign of interest in an exciting but unproven new frontier of drug development. Glaxo rival AstraZeneca Plc joined with Seres Therapeutics Inc. earlier this year to study microbiome-based approaches to boost the efficacy of cancer immune therapies, while others take aim at illnesses from obesity to depression, seeking to turn fresh discoveries into commercial products. For Glaxo, the goal is to find novel vaccines.

The field wasn’t “mature enough to really consider something serious” until recently, Emmanuel Hanon, the research and development head of Glaxo’s vaccines business, said in an interview. “The science behind the microbiome has evolved amazingly in recent years, even months.”

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates wrote in an editorial last month that new insights into gut bacteria could help prevent malnutrition, obesity, asthma, allergies as well as some auto-immune diseases.

The Glaxo deal, focused on chronic diseases, will give the drugmaker access to technology licensed from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico as well as data from tailored research projects. The Seattle-based company examines the collection of gut organisms based on stool samples. To do so, it uses an artificial intelligence system nicknamed Vie to analyze how they function and what their genes tell them to do. Neither Glaxo nor Viome agreed to provide financial terms of the two-year agreement.

Data Boom

Declining costs to sequence RNA and advances in artificial intelligence could allow Viome to crunch huge amounts of information from millions of people in a way that was never possible before, said Naveen Jain, the company’s founder.

Viome’s stool tests try to assess whether the body is turning food into nutrients or harmful toxins, and then delivers personalized recommendations to clients. Jain aims to boost the company’s customer base to 1 million by the end of next year from more than 100,000 now, driven by distribution deals with food companies he declined to name.

Using microbiome data as a way to potentially come up with new vaccines “even half a decade ago would have been a completely bizarre concept,” said Jain, who has started other companies including InfoSpace, an early web-services provider that became a symbol of the dot-com boom and bust. “Think about how far we’ve come. We have a completely new way of looking at the human body.”

The fledgling field has already experienced some significant setbacks. San Francisco-based uBiome, which allowed consumers to monitor their gut microbes, filed for bankruptcy protection in September following a government investigation into its billing practices.

That hasn’t deterred investors and pharma companies. Merck & Co. last month reached an agreement with 4D Pharma Plc to gain insights into the microbiome with the goal of creating new vaccines. Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. also signed a deal last year with Enterome SA, a biotech firm developing medicines at the crossroads between the immune system and the microbiome.

Hanon wouldn’t identify specific diseases the partners will focus on. The Viome collaboration is part of Glaxo’s plans to come up with the next generation of vaccines. The company wants to expand in therapeutic vaccines, used after an infection occurs, and to speed up the development of new shots.

To contact the reporter on this story: James Paton in London at jpaton4@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Marthe Fourcade, Rick Schine

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