MEDICAL
CosmosID | June 22, 2022
CosmosID®, an American provider of end-to-end microbiome platforms and award-winning metagenomics services, announced entering into a microbiome partnership with a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing a new class of precision-engineered bacteriophage treatments, Locus Biosciences, Inc. With this partnership, CosmosID focuses on providing its GCP-compliant and CLIA-certified laboratory services for Locus' clinical trial initiatives in the microbiome field.
Locus is developing two innovative biotherapeutics categories to meet significant unaddressed medical needs. First, engineered bacteriophage therapies that use bacteria resident in specific body locations to dispatch therapeutic molecules. Second, precision CRISPR-enhanced bacteriophage (crPhage®) products to combat fatal infections, including the ones caused by multi-drug resistant bacteria.
Locus is able to swiftly recognize, distinguish, engineer, and produce bacteriophage products against bacterial targets involved in the pathogenesis of numerous diseases by collaborating discovery automation, industry-leading informatics, synthetic biology, and sophisticated in-house manufacturing.
CosmosID's infrastructure for providing access to compliant, higher resolution, and robust microbiome analysis will allow Locus to enhance its capability and add insight into precision therapeutics platforms. With its shotgun metagenomics, the company will assist Locus in understanding its products' effectiveness through CosmosID's robust resolution microbiome analysis, commencing with its urinary tract infection clinical program.
We're thrilled to partner with Locus on its groundbreaking clinical pipeline as we help the company better understand the impact of these phages on the microbiome, Locus' robust and diligent approach to this study is much needed in the field and we look forward to helping them build a strong clinical data package."
Manoj Dadlani, CEO of CosmosID.
This partnership with CosmosID will allow Locus to monitor microbiome changes upon treatment of patients with antibiotics and with crPhage, helping us to evaluate the impact of preserving and protecting their microflora while clearing their infections."
Paul Garofolo, CEO of Locus Biosciences.
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DIAGNOSTICS
Zoetis | June 27, 2022
Zoetis Inc. is the world's largest animal health company committed to providing medicine and vaccinations for pets and livestock. The company announced completing the acquisition of a privately held petcare genetics company, Basepaws, which offers early health risk assessments, genetic tests, and analytics to pet owners. The acquisition was first announced on June 7th. However, the financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed.
Basepaws, founded by CEO Anna Skaya in 2017, provides genetic screening tools for the diagnosis of several pet diseases, health reports, and individualized breeds by identifying traits, potential hereditary conditions, and biomarkers.
With the help of genetic insights from Basepaws, pet owners and doctors can better understand a pet's risk for the disease. This can result in more meaningful interactions and improve the chances of early identification and treatment of the disease.
When we first met Basepaws CEO Anna Skaya and the team, we were immediately drawn to their passion for pets and the role that genetic testing and data analytics can have in advancing animal care – a purpose that drives us every day,The addition of Basepaws will enhance our portfolio in the precision animal health space and inform our future pipeline of petcare innovations. Working together, we can continue to provide veterinarians and pet owners with more comprehensive ways to proactively manage the health, wellness, and quality of care for their animals."
Zoetis, CEO Kristin Peck.
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MEDTECH
Evaxion Biotech | July 04, 2022
The clinical-stage biotechnology company Evaxion Biotech A/S which specializes in the creation of AI-driven immunotherapies, said today that it has chosen gonorrhea as its second bacterial target for the Company's EVX-B2 vaccine product candidate.
Evaxion has opted to create a preventative vaccination against Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease (STD) that has fast acquired antibiotic resistance, as its second bacterial target. Based on preliminary results in pre-clinical models, we think Evaxion's unique AI platform EDEN has discovered promising antigen candidates for the vaccine.
“We are very pleased to announce that our AI platform EDEN has demonstrated the ability to identify two promising protective antigens based on very encouraging results in the pre-clinical model. Gonorrhea represents a large unmet medical need. We believe that with this vaccine, patients will be able to produce antibodies against bacterial infection - minimizing the risk of infection”
Lars Staal Wegner, CEO
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