The former Pfizer campus in New York’s Hudson Valley owned by Industrial Realty Group has gained a new tenant.
The former Pfizer campus in New York’s Hudson Valley owned by Industrial Realty Group has gained a new tenant – NuBiyota, a privately-held company developing an innovative microbiome therapeutics platform.
NuBiyota signed a lease for space on the campus, The Journal News reported. NuBiyota is currently in the process of moving into the campus space. Despite the acknowledgement that NuBiyota is coming to the Pearl River site, the company has remained tight-lipped about what will be the focus of that site.
“I hope that you can respect the fact that NuBiyota is a private company and don’t [SIC] want to disclose any information about its business activities,” Nissim Mashiach, a NuBiyota cofounder told the Journal News in an email.
NuBiyota’s website provides very little information about the company. It only has a contact form on the page.
In April, NuBiyota struck a collaborative deal with Japanese pharma giant Takeda Pharmaceuticals to treat gastroenterology indications for patients with unmet needs. The company’s announced they will collaborate to advance oral microbial consortia products that will be developed using NuBiyota’s microbiome platform for GI indications. In the statement issued by Takeda, NuBiyota described its Microbial Ecosystem Therapeutic as a “clinic-ready microbial consortia” that provides an “entry point for clinical evaluation of microbiome based therapeutics.” The system is designed to enhance the understanding of the role of microbiota in GI disease, Takeda said in its April announcement.
Asit Parikh, head of Takeda’s gastroenterology therapeutic area unit, said at the time of the deal that the collaboration with NuBiyota “reinforces Takeda’s long-term commitment to unmet medical need in gastroenterology and adds to our other microbiome-related partnerships.”
NuBiyota’s platform was developed by Emma Allen-Vercoe of the University of Guelph. In April, FierceBiotech reported that Allen-Vercoe and her colleagues treated Clostridium difficile (C.diff) infections with a “cocktail of bacteria” that was described as a synthetic stool. The study, which was performed in 2013, generated excitements after “a 33-strain, 25-species microbial ecosystem derived from a healthy donor was successfully used to treat two elderly patients with severe recurrent C. difficile infections,” FierceBiotech reported. That success spawned NuBiyota.
Since then though, the company has remained in stealth mode. Even details released to the public from the collaboration with Takeda were minimal. A search on LinkedIn reveals a handful of current and former employees at the company, including Yining Zhao, a venture partner at Lilly Asia Ventures, is listed as co-founder and China CEO of NuBiyota. LinkedIn searches show a few former associates and interns, as well as one current research scientist.
