Lloyd Kasper

Equity Interest - Non-publicly traded entity ( e.g., stock, stock option, or other ownership interest)

Novel commensal polysaccharide treats multiple sclerosis through Treg modulation

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is chronic and severely debilitating immune-mediated inflammatory disease of the human central nervous system, affecting 450,000 patients in the U.S., and over 3.5 million patients worldwide. The disease knows no borders and over the past 50 years has assumed a similar global incidence and frequency profile that continues to expand. The currently approved platform treatments for MS are immunomodulatory and result in modest to moderate effect on clinical relapse rate. Although the older therapies are safe with very few adverse side effects the more recent therapies either approved by the FDA or under consideration for registration do appear to have greater impact on relapse rate but can exhibit potent immune suppression or immune ablation of the immune system, and are increasingly associated with serious adverse events including cardiac arrhythmia, opportunistic infections, and profound long-term lymphopenia. Thus the niche for an effective, easily administered treatment that will allow for the resetting and repopulation of specific regulatory immune compartments without compromising the host immune system is important and necessary. Recent work emerging from the human microbiome, which is the collection of >10,000 microbial species that live on and in the human body, has identified a specific bacterial species that resides in the human gut as crucial to maintaining a healthy immune system and protecting against immune-mediated diseases such as MS. The scientific founders of our company have closely studied this microbe, Bacteroides fragilis, and have identified a single capsular polysaccharide molecule (PSA) that is responsible for the protective effect. Symbiotix Biotherapies, Inc. is a startup biotechnology company formed to bring this new therapy to patients as an orally administered, safe and effective treatment for MS, and the Phase 2 STTR project will enable crucial studies that will give us safety and efficacy information and allow production of necessary amounts of drug needed to begin human clinical trials.