The race is on to be the first company to have a microbiome therapy approved, with US firm Seres Therapeutics, Inc. staking its claim after inking a lucrative deal with Nestle Health Science to jointly commercialize SER-109 in North America for recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI).
The partners started collaborating back in January 2016 when Nestlé, which had already bought a stake in the Cambridge, MA-based company a year earlier, acquired rights outside of the US and Canada to four candidates – SER-109, SER-262 (also for CDI), SER-287 for ulcerative colitis and SER-301 for Crohn’s disease. The Swiss giant paid $120m up front and that agreement was worth potentially over $1.9bn