London-based biotech Neobe Therapeutics has raised $6.8 million in seed funding to help progress its engineered bacterial medicines for use in treating cancer.
Neobe’s treatments are essentially enablers of immunotherapy in the form of engineered bacterial medicines intended to help a separate cancer treatment work. The seed funding is intended to take the company’s lead candidate, NEO22, through preclinical studies towards an IND application to start clinical trials in 2028.
ARC Ventures led the seed round, joined by Faber, Macmillan Ventures, Proven Connect, Empirical Ventures and existing investor 2048 Ventures. Total funding for Neobe since it launched exceeds $10.5 million.
Founded in 2021 by cancer biologist Pedro Correa de Sampaio, PhD, and microbiologist and immunologist Annelise Soulier, PhD, now CEO and CSO of the company, respectively, it emerged from a venture-building collaboration between Deep Science Ventures and Cancer Research Horizons.
Certain bacteria naturally colonize the low-oxygen regions inside solid tumors. These can provide favorable conditions for particular bacteria, especially those able to grow without oxygen. Local suppression of immune responses can also help such bacteria survive.
William Coley, a surgical oncologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, recognized bacteria could help treat cancer in the late 19th century. He had some success treating patients using these ideas during his lifetime but the technique was poorly understood and results very variable making replicability difficult.
Neobe’s more modern approach uses engineered versions of these extremophile bacteria as enzyme factories inside tumors, helping open up tissue that keeps therapeutic immune cells out. The bacteria carry engineered genetic switches that respond to conditions such as low oxygen and acidity. These control production of tissue-destroying enzymes, aiming to concentrate their activity inside the tumor.
The bacteria release the enzymes into the extracellular matrix between cells. Neobe’s lead approach uses hyaluronidase, an enzyme that breaks down hyaluronic acid, one component of that matrix. Breaking down this barrier is intended to let cancer-fighting immune cells penetrate more effectively into the tumors, helping immunotherapies work when otherwise they might not.
The company reports success with its technology in a preclinical mouse model of triple-negative breast cancer resistant to a combination of immunotherapies. Adding a single dose of engineered bacteria produced complete tumor regression. Subsequent exposure to the same cancer months later did not produce new tumors in the mice, suggesting immune memory was active.
“Several treatments that can cure cancer already exist, but in far too many patients they simply cannot get to where they are needed. I’m delighted to be working with investors that share our vision of making untreatable cancers curable, and excited to move our platform towards clinical trials,” said Correa de Sampaio in a press statement.
Neobe are not the only ones trying to use microbes to improve the efficacy of cancer therapies. Some competitors are ahead of Neobe, although none have approved therapies to date. For example, Actym Therpaeutics, currently at Phase I is also using engineered bacteria to deliver immune activating agents into tumors. Similar to Neobe, but using a viral route, Theriva Biologics is using a cancer-killing virus producing hyaluronidase to break down the tumor’s surrounding matrix and is currently at Phase II.
