4D Pharma plc (AIM: DDDD), a pharmaceutical company focusing on the development of live biotherapeutics, today provides the following research update on Blautix™ for the treatment of Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
4D has been working towards its goal of bringing new therapeutics to the clinic in 2015, and has made significant steps in its understanding and modelling of disease to enable the Company to better develop medicines of the future. 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, stated: "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."
