Filament BioSolutions, a New York-based clinical nutrition therapeutics specialist from announced a collaboration with the University of Ottawa and Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) as a corporate partner for a $9.1M CAD ($7.4M USD) project to study the clinical application of microbiome-based precision nutrition in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
According to the company’s press release, the research project is funded by Genome Canada and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).
Filament said it will support research focused on nutrition-based therapies using resistant starch for the targeted modulation of gut bacteria in inflammatory bowel disease.
The company noted that recent advances in the understanding of the microbiome’s involvement in IBD has reshaped therapeutic strategies and has brought the promise of precision medicine to the forefront of our research efforts, where the unique microbiome of each patient can be used to identify the optimal treatment to restore symbiosis and induce IBD remission.
IBD is a chronic disease associated with severe inflammation of the gut and affects more than 1.5 million patients in the United States and Canada, Filament pointed out. “There is a clear need for novel therapeutics and diagnostics due to increasing global IBD incidence and the failure of some patients to respond to existing therapies. Recent advances characterizing the composition and function of the gut microbiome have created an opportunity to develop technologies that address the underlying causes of IBD,” the company’s press release reads.
Tom Cirrito, CEO of Filament, said this is a major first step that brings developing a nutritional therapy candidate closer for a widely recognized unmet medical need in IBD that will improve quality of care for the patients. “The project represents a unique multidisciplinary effort uniting the expertise of academia, clinical nutrition, biotechnology, and traditional food companies toward the common goal of disease modifying therapies for this debilitating life-long disease,” Cirrito said.