Enterome has had a first closing of a series A funding round, raising EUR 5 million. This funding follows a previous seed round that raised EUR 1.5 million from Seventure and INRA Transfert.
The series A round has brought in Seventure and Lundbeckfond Ventures, as new colead investors. Seventure is one of the most active European investors in venture capital investing in Life Sciences and Information and Communication Technologies. Lundbeckfond Ventures is a pure life science venture fund investing into companies in Europe and in the US.
Enetrome is a medicine company developing biomarkers for chronic and challenging medical conditions relating to abnormalities of bacterial composition of the human intestine (metabolic and bowel diseases). The amount raised will enable the company to fulfil several objectives. Firstly, Enterome will validate its proprietary biomarkers, translate them into high value medical diagnostics and offer these tests as Laboratory Developed Test services in the US and EU. Enteromes’ two lead projects are in NonAlcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) and in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD).
The new management team is highly experienced and made up of a blend of former founders and executives of fovea pharmaceuticals (acquired by sanofi in 2009) and biomarkers specialists. Bernard Gilly was also appointed as the new chairman of the board.
“Our intestine harbours an incredible number of bacteria, the gut microbiota, encoding 150fold more genes than our own genome. Each individual has his own personal and unique microbiota, with a large diversity between individuals. Over the last five years, physicians and researchers have proved the undisputed role of gut microbiota in the development of various diseases, especially metabolic disorders and inflammatory bowel diseases. These diseases affect 25% of the western world population, with NASH, the most harmful, diagnosed in 2 – 3% of the population globally,” says Pierre Belichard, CEO, Enterome. “Works performed by Enterome’s scientific founders have improved understanding of the compositional and functional dynamics of the human microbiota to the point of now allowing development of powerful new biomarkers and associated therapeutics. This technology was elected as one of top 5 scientific breakthroughs of 2011 by the journal Science.”
Enterome’s technology was developed initially at the INRA laboratory of Dusko Ehrlich at JouyenJosas, France. Enterome has entered into a collaboration agreement with INRA providing an exclusive access to discoveries made on INRA’s metagenomic platform in selected human pathologies including type 2 diabetes, liver and bowel diseases,
“Measurement and modulation of the gut microbiota’s role in health and disease presents the opportunity to impact medicine in an entirely new and unexplored way” said Dusko Ehrlich, scientific founder of Enterome and leader of the metaHIT European consortium (the International Human Microbiome Congress, has been organized by MetaHIT in Paris, March 1921, 2012 – www.metahit.eu).
Gerard Jacquin, president of INRA transfert (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique), says: “We are particularly pleased to see one of our main research assets being translated into a company and financed by an international consortium of investors. Enterome is a key element in our Metagenopolis organization: a center for excellence in metagenomics of the human gut microbiota developed at INRA and recently awarded, by the French ministry of Research, a significative grant to develop this research platform into an industrial tool.”
The series A round investors Seventure and Lundbeckfond Ventures were specifically attracted to Enterome due to the unique nature of their technology, the close relationship to INRA and the opportunity to create unique biomarker diagnostic products meeting unmet medical and market needs.
“I am particularly proud to see Enterome coming out of the ground of the longstanding relationship Seventure has established with INRA over the last four years,” says Isabelle de Cremoux, CEO of Seventure subsidiary of Natixis.
“We are impressed by the Enterome leadership and are very confident that Enterome will translate this very innovative platform into valuable diagnostic and therapeutic tools” indicated Johan Kördel from Lundbeckfond Ventures.
Emmanuelle Porte, Partner, Corporate, Private Equity Nixon Peabody acted as a legal advisor for Enterome in the series A funding round.
