As a partner at a venture capital firm, Seventure Partners, with a focus on microbiome therapeutics, Eric de la Fortelle has a rare overview of the whole emerging microbiome field - 'we are talking to all the KOLs, to all the entrepreneurs'. At EBD's BIO-Europe Spring, de la Fortelle spoke to Global Director of Content at Informa Pharma Insights Mike Ward about the rapid emergence of the human microbiome space and where it is going in the near future. Read the highlights or watch the full interview below.
MW: In the biotech industry, we've seen a lot of fads, so to cut to the chase, is the microbiome hype or is it happening?
EdlF: 'There is an element of fashion in the microbiome, especially because it went very far from the lab bench to the public consciousness with lots of books, lots of news articles. But at the root of it, there is an incontrovertible truth that we've ignored the bacteria around us and in us for half a century or more and the beneficial effects of them.
Now, the hype is the flip of the coin of doing too much to kill all the bacteria around us and people realizing that they've done something wrong and wanting to counterbalance in their daily lives, but also in their health habits, in their drugs and in their nutrition, and that's why the field is so important.'
MW: What kick-started it? When did the microbiome become something people were really talking about?
EdlF: 'Once upon a time it was called the intestinal flora. What transitioned it to the microbiome and the deep understanding of what's going on is the advent in the early 2000s of the deep sequencing technology - the metagenomics - where you take a universe of bacteria and you sequence them all at the same time. You have the genetic material of this meta-population and you have to piece together what belongs to which bacteria. This brought enormous knowledge in the early to late 2000s and now it is being complimented by proteomics, by metabolomics, and every day we understand more about what species do what, how they interact together and most importantly how they interact with the human body.'
RELATED ARTICLE: Could gut bacteria be used to treat autism and Parkinson's?
MW: How is that going to translate into therapeutics or advantageous clinical outcomes?
EdlF: 'It's becoming more and more clear that it fits a medical niche that is being under-served at the moment. That doesn't mean drugs will be easy to find, but drugs are never easy to find. It is clear the microbe human interaction is something that can be utilized to find drugs. How exactly is it going to be utilized? Is it a one bacteria treatment? Is is going to be a multiple bacteria treatment? Is it going to be a bacteriophage selectively killing some bacteria? It's going to be probably all of the above. In which order? Anyone's guess, but we are investing in all of those to see something come to market.'
MW: So in some respects it's about developing treatments that affect those bugs, or it's actually using those bugs as a therapeutic?
EdlF: 'It's both. Using bug against bug makes intuitive sense, but we have for instance a company developing small molecules against the toxicities of certain bacteria. These small molecules are in between the bacterium that misbehaves and the human that is on the receiving end of the misbehavior. Stopping the misbehavior of bacteria is one way to alleviate disease - a novel one.'
MW: Where are we on that timeline of going from the concept to actually having something you can give to a patient?
EdlF: 'There's low hanging fruit - there's a number of products already on the market in cosmetics, in probiotics, in functional nutrition that utilize this biology, either at the edge or core of the business. The Phase II high quality clinical studies are happening today for the new generation of actives and these will come to market if they are successful I would say in the next three years.'
Watch the full interview to discover where de la Fortelle sees microbiome investment coming from and the current success stories in the field.
This interview was filmed at BIO-Europe Spring (March 2017).
RELATED ARTICLE: Human skin microbiome - what is the therapeutic potential?