Melius MicroBiomics Inc., a biotechnology company spun out of UBC Okanagan, is preparing to take its engineered microbial therapeutic to human trials in Australia this summer.
A probiotic bioengineered by UBC Okanagan researchers to thrive in the inflamed gut is set to enter human clinical trials, capping a decade-long effort to turn a beneficial bacterium into a treatment for inflammatory bowel disease.
The strategy, detailed in a proof-of-concept study published in Gastroenterology, tackles a stubborn problem in microbiome medicine: getting beneficial bacteria to survive in a gut that’s actively inflamed.
An inflamed gut is why probiotics have largely failed to produce clinical effects, as UBCO’s Drs. Deanna Gibson and Andrea Verdugo-Meza have previously demonstrated.
Trials are scheduled to begin in Australia this August.
“We worked for over a decade to get to this point,” says Dr. Gibson, a professor of biology in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science and the study’s senior author. “Probiotics tend to wash out of the gut exactly when patients need them most—during a flare. We wanted to flip that and engineer the probiotic to use inflammation as fuel.”
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