BiomX Enters Collaboration with Johnson & Johnson Innovation for Discovery of Microbiome-based Biomarkers for IBD

BiomX Ltd., a microbiome company developing customized phage therapies, today announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Janssen Research & Development, LLC to utilize BiomX's XMarker microbiome-based biomarker discovery platform. The XMarker platform will be used to stratify responders and non-responders to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) therapeutics. The collaboration was facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation Limited.

"The XMarker platform was created for BiomX's microbial target discovery, based on the advanced algorithms developed by our scientific founders and our internal computational team," stated Jonathan Solomon, CEO of BiomX. "Beyond target discovery, we believe that our microbiome analytics holds great promise for the development of a new class of biomarkers in major disease areas such as liver disease, cancer and IBD."

There is growing evidence that the composition of the microbiome is a promising predictive tool for disease and for patient response to therapy in conditions such as IBD, cancer and liver disease. BiomX's novel XMarker platform applies a unique metagenomics-based approach to decipher full microbial genomic signatures that can be further developed into predictive biomarkers. The platform combines ultra-high-resolution DNA analysis, machine-learning techniques and high-scale cloud computing resources to build classifiers of high sensitivity and specificity.