4D pharma reports encouraging progress

BIO-medical company 4D Pharma says it has made good progress in its research project exploring the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome.

The Manchester company, which floated in February 2014, raising more than £16m is focused on an area of science called live biotherapeutics.

Its latest market update relates to a trade-marked programme called Blautix, which it says could be used to develop tratements beyond Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

It said: “Through its work on the Blautix™ programme, 4D has developed a method for humanising disease models (in this case IBS) using the gut microbiome of patients. This allows 4D to better study the effects and likely outcome of its therapeutics targeting IBS and it may also be applicable to other diseases. The humanised disease models are expected to more faithfully reproduce the conditions in the gut of patients and therefore enable the effects of targeted therapeutics to be assessed more accurately.”

Dr Alex Stevenson, chief scientific officer of 4D, added: “The models developed demonstrate the effect of Blautix in an environment that closely resembles that of an IBS patient, which is extremely useful in helping 4D towards its target of a first in man study in Q2 2015.

“We are excited by the possibility that using this new approach in other disease models will further help the development of our pipeline of live biotherapeutics by more accurately replicating the interactions between our therapeutics, the human microbiome and the underlying causes of disease.”

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