July 13, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
The Bay Area’s Second Genome announced new additions to its Series B financing round, bringing the total to $51 million. In addition, it named Glenn Nedwin as chief executive officer, president and member of the board of directors.
In April, Second Genome announced it had closed on its Series B investment round with a total of $42.6 million. It was co-led by Pfizer Venture Investments and Roche Venture Fund. They were joined by new investors, Digitalis Ventures, Adveq, LifeForce Capital, MBL Venture Capital, and Mayo Clinic. Previous investors included Advanced Technology Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures, Seraph Group, and individual investor Matthew Winkler.
Today’s announcement reported that SR One, Limited, the corporate venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline , had joined the Series B round.
“We are on the cusp of the next paradigm shift in health and medicine,” said Nedwin in a statement. “I was drawn to Second Genome because its microbiome-derived technology platform and product pipeline have enormous potential to transform medicine, as well as consumer and animal health, agriculture and industrial applications. I look forward to working with the Second Genome team to build on their success as we use our platform to bring novel therapeutics to the market.”
Nedwin was most recently the chief executive officer of Taxon Biosciences, an environmental and agricultural microbiome company. It was acquired in 2015 by DuPont . He has also acted as president of Novozymes , as executive vice president of the Genencor Technical Enzymes Division of Danisco, which was acquired by DuPont in 2011.
The company’s plans are to use the money raised to take its lead product, SGM-1019, through a mid-stage clinical trial for inflammation and pain in individuals with ulcerative colitis.
The company was spun out of Gary Andersen’s laboratory at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its focus is on developing drugs that target functional proteins, peptides and metabolites that are generated from the gut’s microbiome. Approximately 33 percent of metabolites in circulation in the human body are a product of gut microbiota. Changes to that environment can cause human cellular changes, which can lead to disease or disease progression.
Second Genome was founded by biotech entrepreneur Corey Goodman, who is a partner at venBio. Previously Goodman was president of Pfizer ‘s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center. He also co-founded Exelixis , Renovis, and Ossianix before he joined venBio.
“At Second Genome, we have developed a unique and powerful platform for identifying and developing microbiome-mediated molecular pathways implicated in health and disease,” said Karim Dabbagh, the company’s chief scientific officer, in a statement. “I look forward to working with Glenn to exploit our metagenomic profiling of host-microbe interactions and significant microbial databases of diseased and healthy humans for drug discovery and development.”
Second Genome has approximately 25 employees. In addition to its drug development programs, it has pharmaceutical and biotech clients that utilize its technology platform to sequence microbial genomes. The advantage is the company can bring in revenue while developing its drug program.
