I have extensive experience in microbiology and infectious diseases in both academia and industry. Taken together, our founding team has ~100 years of combined experience in microbiology and ecology, food science and chemistry. My cofounders have previously founded other health companies with specialized products (eg. Evolve Biosystems and BCD Bioscience).
We have been focused on structure-function analysis of mammalian milk and the benefits individual components can bring to human health for about two decades. In recent years, we discovered peptides in milk that have selective antimicrobial activity, meaning that they know who the pathogens are, and essentially go after them fast for elimination while bypassing the "good" bugs, leaving them around to continue their jobs. That was the moment we decided we needed to bring these to the market.
One niche in the human body where the imbalance between the good and the bad is really bad, is the human vagina. We've been focusing on specific bacteria that reside in the normal human vagina and those that take over to cause disease. In particular, we hope to reduce the burden of bacterial vaginosis, which remains unresolved with current antibiotics. This is especially important because these infections tend to recur, and can lead to secondary infections and reproductive issues.
Antibiotic discovery is hard, technically and financially. To develop candidate molecules from early stage research to clinically viable products, with efficacy and safety that do better than current standard-of-care, is a major challenge. An opportunity like this one doesn't come around often so we're pretty excited about it.
Converting milk components into therapeutics- now isn't that a great hack? We think so! Happy to hear your thoughts and answer questions!
>Taken together, our founding team has ~100 years of combined experience in microbiology and ecology, food science and chemistry.
Minor nitpick: Without knowing the size of your team, this sentence is really hard to make sense of. Having 100 people with 1 year of experience each is a lot less impressive than having 10 people with 10 years of experience each.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by-prescripti...
Re your comment about founders' experience, we are four founders (three full time Professors, and a senior scientist), with academic and translational portfolio.
Would that cause problems for the effectiveness of human milk in the general population?
(Also aside: perhaps fix the spelling mistake in the submission title!)
Milk, as a whole will remain to be very effective, like it has been during the millions of years of mammalian evolution. The entire constellation of molecules present in milk (and still many unknowns) will allow for continued functionality (with many exclusive and redundant roles).
That spelling error you pointed out..argh!!! But thanks.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
I was quite surprised to find out there are thousands of women suffering decade long issues with no help or just enormous, health devastating doses of antibiotics (multi-year long therapies).
There's been so many approaches over the years (I watched the d-mannose just explode in sales when previously there was none available) but they do not seem to work completely.
There are also small research groups trying to figure out what's happening but there's still no widely accepted therapies. For example, doctors from most EU contries would never prescribe the amount of antibiotics required for multi-year therapies.
It was also quite surprising to me, as a male, when I got my first UTI, they gave me quite a lot of antibiotics, but then when my wife complains about it, she gets silly advice (get pregnant, drink multivitamins, it's probably not UTI [until she starts having kidney infections or urinates blood]).
What benefits do these peptides have over other emerging therapies, such as phages?
Have you mapped out the mechanism of action by which the peptides are antimicrobial? How does it compare to antibiotics derived from fungi?
How scalable is this if it works as well as you hope it will? Is there a path to peptide synthesis without requiring milk as an input?