In the latest in Nestlé’s efforts to establish a presence in the gastroenterology space, the company will pay over $40 million upfront to Enterome as part of a new partnership.
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Paris-based Enterome and Swiss company Nestlé Health Science announced on Monday that they have entered into a strategic R&D partnership aimed at developing cutting-edge therapeutics for food allergies and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This partnership is only the latest in Nestlé’s efforts to establish a stronger presence in the gastroenterology therapeutics space.
The collaboration will see Nestlé hand over €40 million ($40,672,080 USD) in cash and equity upfront, as well as milestone and royalty payments, to Enterome. In return, Enterome agrees to take charge of the drug discovery and development work and assume all related costs up until a candidate has been designated as an investigational new drug.
Specifically, the Enterome-Nestlé alliance will focus on the former’s lead candidate EB1010, a locally-acting agent that can strongly induce the production of the anti-inflammatory IL-10. The two companies are looking to leverage EB1010’s mode of action to improve therapeutic outcomes in patients suffering from IBD and food allergies. The drug candidate is set to start clinical assessments next year.
“Approximately 220 million people around the world live with food allergies, while seven million live with inflammatory bowel disease,” Hans-Juergen Woerle, chief scientific and medical officer of Nestlé Health Science, said in a statement. “Through this collaboration, we are aiming to develop novel therapies for these two disease areas with high unmet medical need. We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Enterome on their unique microbiome drug discovery platform striving to develop first-in-class, high-quality treatment solutions that will help patients to live a healthier life.”
Enterome’s approach to drug discovery rests on mimicry and relies on the gut microbiome, the rich population of bacteria and other microorganisms that reside in the intestines. The company first zeroes in on a molecule with a well-understood biological role. Then, through a proprietary mimicry biocomputational platform, Enterome searches through its database of more than 20 million microbiome proteins for an analog that could achieve a similar effect as their target.
Through this mimicry approach, Enterome is running its EndoMimics program, which produces a pipeline of bioactive agents for immune diseases. EB1010 is a product of EndoMimics. On top of this, the mimicry platform also powers Enterome’s AllerMimics program to identify immunotherapeutic candidates for food allergies.
This is of particular interest to Nestlé Health Science, a division of the food industry giant Nestlé. The agreement between the two companies is also meant to further develop the AllerMimics program to generate a more robust pipeline of compounds, with an initial focus on peanut allergy.
In August 2020, the company decided to acquire all outstanding shares of the food allergy-focused Aimmune, paying $2.6 billion in cash. The buyout was the culmination of years of financing from Nestlé which, at the time of the acquisition, had invested nearly $500 million into Aimmune and owned more than a quarter of its shares.
Acquiring Aimmune gave Nestlé access to Palforzia, an oral immunotherapeutic drug to dampen allergic reactions to peanuts. Palforzia had won approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration just months before the deal.
In July last year, Nestlé again expanded its gastro portfolio by entering into a joint commercialization agreement with the Massachusetts-based biotech company Seres Therapeutics. The partnership was focused on SER-109, Seres’ oral candidate for recurrent Clostridioides difficile infections. SER-109, which delivers purified firmicutes to the gut microbiota to prevent C. difficile colonies from taking hold, demonstrated strong Phase III results last month.
If approved, the candidate could win Seres and Nestlé the first-ever microbiome therapeutic.
