CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Vedanta Biosciences, pioneering the development of a new class of therapies designed to modulate the human microbiome, today announced that it has raised $50 million in new equity investments. New investors Rock Springs Capital, Invesco Asset Management and Health For Life Capital (Seventure) were joined by PureTech in the financing. Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance multiple clinical studies in infectious and autoimmune diseases and to scale the company’s technology platform.
“We are grateful for the strong support from venture and leading public healthcare investors who share our vision to take the microbiome field beyond fecal transplants and into rationally defined bacterial consortia,” said Bernat Olle, Ph.D., CEO of Vedanta Biosciences. “This financing positions us to advance multiple candidates that have emerged from our discovery platform into clinical trials.”
Vedanta Biosciences has built a proprietary platform for the discovery, development, and manufacturing of drugs based on live commensal microbes. Using its platform, Vedanta has isolated a vast collection of human-associated bacterial strains, characterized how the immune system recognizes and responds to these microbes, and generated a pipeline of drug candidates consisting of defined bacterial consortia in development for infectious disease, immune tolerance, inflammation, and immuno-oncology. Vedanta’s platform is built on pioneering work published in Science, Nature and Cell, among other peer-reviewed journals. The Company attracted the first large deal with a pharmaceutical company in the microbiome field in a landmark licensing agreement with Johnson & Johnson with up-front and milestone payments of up to $339 million. The Company recently expanded into a new headquarters and research and development facility in Cambridge, MA, including a state-of-the-art Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) facility for fully integrated discovery and production of live bacterial drugs.
About Vedanta Biosciences
Vedanta Biosciences is pioneering a novel class of therapies designed to modulate pathways of interaction between the human microbiome and the host immune system. The first to rationally design a drug candidate based on consortia of human commensal bacteria, Vedanta has capabilities that enable discovery, development, and manufacturing of drugs based on live commensal microbes. Vedanta is advancing a pipeline of product candidates designed to treat autoimmune, inflammatory and infectious diseases, which have been developed using Vedanta’s proprietary technology platform.
Vedanta Biosciences was founded by PureTech Health (PureTech Health plc, PRTC.L) and a group of leading experts in immunology and microbiology. Vedanta’s scientific co-founders have pioneered the fields of innate immunity, Th17 and regulatory T cell biology, and include Dr. Ruslan Medzhitov (Professor of Immunobiology at Yale), Dr. Alexander Rudensky (tri-institutional Professor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute, the Rockefeller University and Cornell University), Dr. Dan Littman (Professor of Molecular Immunology at NYU), Dr. Brett Finlay (Professor at the University of British Columbia) and Dr. Kenya Honda (Professor, School of Medicine, Keio University). Vedanta’s Board of Directors includes Board Chairman Christopher Viehbacher, Managing Partner at Gurnet Point Capital and former CEO and Member of the Board of Directors of Sanofi; Dr. Bennett Shapiro, former Executive Vice President of Merck; Dr. John LaMattina, former President of research and development at Pfizer and David Steinberg, Co-Founder of Vedanta and Executive Vice President at PureTech.
