Portion of Money Will Be Used to Advance Autism Treatment
Finch Therapeutics Group has raised $90 million to push its oral microbiome drug to treat recurrent C. difficile infection toward a regulatory submission with the FDA. The money raised will also be used to initiate a Phase 1b study evaluating a similar drug for autism spectrum disorder, as well as to advance treatments for chronic hepatitis B infection, ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
Finch’s approach to treating these diseases involves using stool samples from healthy donors and extracting microbes from the sample, then suspending them in a chemical that preserves them as they’re frozen, freeze-dried and milled into a powder. This powder then becomes a capsule specially designed to release the microbes at a precise spot in the gastrointestinal tract. Once they are in place, they rehydrate and repopulate the gut with healthy microbes.
Finch’s investigational oral microbiome drug FIN-211 is targeted toward the treatment of children with ASD who suffer from serious gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms. FIN-211 is designed to re-establish a normal microbiome composition and function, building off pre-clinical and clinical studies suggesting that the GI and behavioral symptoms of autism may be linked to a disrupted microbiome.
