In Kraków, the Bioinformatics company Ardigen has now partnered up with a US based Microbiome startup, EpiBiome, which is looking for the answer to antibiotic resistance.
This is another example of cross-Atlantic collaboration in the Microbiome world, just as President Obama pledges €105M ($121M) to the up and coming field of therapeutics.
It’s a growing area of research, and as we spoke to Isabelle de Cremoux (founder of the biggest Microbiome fund in the World) last week, the past 12 months have seen a crazy surge in investment, research focus and new initiatives being founded on the Human Microbiome.
Ardigen is one such bioinformatics company to join this movement, based on combination of bio-data science and complementary advanced software support. Their services also include Laboratory information management systems (LIMS) and analytical tools for research.
On the other hand, EpiBiome, is a precision microbiome engineering company based in California.
EpiBiome’s mission is to develop effective and sustainable FDA-approved therapies to combat infectious disease in humans and in agriculture without the use of antibiotics.
This is done by investigating Bacteriophages – bacteria eating viruses which have been used for the better part of a century to treat wounds and burns (particularly in the military by Georgia, Russia and Poland) as an alternative to antibiotics.
The benefits of phage therapy are vast, yet there is little European or US investigation ongoing with this live-alternative to antibiotics (read this in-depth article on Buzzfeed to find out more), with the only unit on phage research in the whole of Europe.
Coincidentally, this is also in Poland at the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy (Wroclaw).
Ardigen’s list of partners are impressive, with strong roots in the US – which as the CBO of one of their Kraków based biotech partners, Selvita, noted: it is essential for a Polish biotech to really grow.
Other examples of Ardigen’s partners also include Harvard Medical School, Abbot Informatics and Qiagen (the NGS Giant in Germany).
This sounds like a strong development for EpiBiome’s growth, which is recruiting the resources needed to bring its technology to the forefront of the Microbiome field.
Feature Image Credit: Ardigen