SA biotech BiomeBank understood to be raising up to $30m from VC investors

An Adelaide microbial therapy pioneer is understood to be raising up to $30m from venture capital investors to improve global gut health.

BiomeBank chief executive Thomas Mitchell and chief medical officer and co-founder Dr Sam Costello.

South Australian microbial therapy pioneer BiomeBank is in the midst of a significant capital raising to drive its ambitious plan become a global leader in gut health improvement.

The clinical stage biotech business is understood to be raising up to $30m in a Series A funding from Australian and overseas venture capital investors.

BiomeBank chief executive Thomas Mitchell, who joined the business earlier this year after leading drug development in the US and UK, said the goal was to launch microbial therapies that would present targeted solutions to debilitating gut problems like ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease.

“What the Series A capital will do is allow us to really move at the speed we need to move at to be a global leader,” Mr Mitchell said.

“I feel like we’re in a really strong position.

“We may even be one of the first people in the world to have microbial therapy approved,” he said.

The Thebarton-based clinical stage biotech company last year set up a stool bank and a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards facility.

The facility, which is expected to gain TGA accreditation this year, processes screened healthy donations to create BiomeBoost, a drug product that is transplanted into patients with debilitating Clostridioides Difficile (C-Diff) infection, an inflammatory bowel condition.

This is done through a procedure called faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), or stool transplant.

The good bacteria helps repopulate the gut’s microbial environment.

BiomeBoost is currently distributed Australia-wide and has proved to be successful.

“We would like to treat patients throughout the Asia-Pacific region and some of the funds would be used for this,” Mr Mitchell said.

But it’s the “reverse engineering” involved in matching certain effective bacteria with target diseases that has exciting prospects, which will triple BiomeBank’s existing workforce of 14 by this time next year.

“Instead of taking the whole community of bacteria from a donor, we’re actually moving to something that’s a bit more defined.

“Someone with ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s disease, let’s say, they have a positive outcome because they’ve been treated with FMT, (then) those kind of data assets are really, really great for drug discovery.

“You kind of reverse engineer … we can find that bacteria that are making their way into patients and then driving positive outcomes.

“We have our culture collection, so we can screen all these bacteria and we can look at which ones have the desirable functions for treating a certain disease.

“And then we go back, and we pick that out of that collection, and take that forward as a product.

“You kind of start to reduce the complexity of FMT into something that’s more defined, more enriched, and has, hopefully, a better drug product in the future for those patients,” Mr Mitchell said.

Last month, BiomeBank and the RMIT University secured $100,000 from the Innovative Manufacturing Cooperative Research Centre (IMCRC) towards a $600,000 research project develop artificial microbial therapies.

BiomeBank was founded in 2013 by Dr Sam Costello and Dr Rob Bryant and incorporated in 2018.

In 2020, SA’s The Hospital Research Foundation became an investor in the business by providing seed capital for the facility.

BiomeBank has also applied for a grant from the Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative for expansion.

Originally published as SA biotech BiomeBank understood to be raising up to $30m from VC investors