Plantibodies

The GI tract represents an untapped frontier in medicine, with its vast surface area of over 300 m² and housing more than 70% of the body's immune cells. It is the homing site of many serious diseases, including inflammatory bowel diseases (like Crohn's and ulcerative colitis), colorectal cancer, and various infections.

Current immunotherapies, such as intravenous or subcutaneous monoclonal antibodies, have a systemic effect that can lead to significant toxicities and poor tissue penetration in the GI tract. As a result, these treatments are often suboptimal for targeting diseases within the GI tract.

What is needed today is the ability to deliver a potent and safe biological therapy directly to the GI tract, precisely where the disease is located.

This is what we intend to do. Our vision is to transform gut medicine through targeted oral biologics. To do so, we have developed and validated a novel, orally administered, delivery platform that releases biologics directly into the GI tract, addressing the significant unmet needs of gut-related diseases in large markets. Our goal is to lead this field, first though local delivery of approved compounds, and subsequently through co-development partnerships potentially involving new compounds.

We target indications with large markets and significant unmet medical needs.

Our lead candidate is an oral anti-TNF alpha for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD).
IBD affects 10 million people worldwide and causes symptoms like rectal bleeding, diarrhea, fatigue, and depression. Around 3 million patients rely on recurring immunosuppressive immunotherapy, which costs between $10,000 and $120,000 per patient per year in the US. These therapies have major limitations due to inadequate efficacy (especially in poorly perfused or necrotic tissues) and severe side effects, such as serious infections, fever, skin rash, neurological disorders, and a higher risk of cancers. An estimated 800,000 patients discontinue treatment due to intolerable side effects. There is a clear need for therapies that directly target GI lymphocytes without systemic constraints—hence, our development of GI-targeted oral biologics. 

To understand the magnitude of the opportunity, it is important to understand that by treating just 50% of IBD patients who discontinue immunotherapy due to side effects, at a price of ~$10,000 per patient per year, we could potentially generate $4 billion in annual revenues globally.

Our second candidate is an oral anti-PD1 for colorectal cancer (CRC).
CRC affects 2 million people annually, resulting in 1 million deaths. While immune checkpoint inhibitors are effective against metastatic cancers, their systemic effect, low tissue penetration, and high toxicity make them unsuitable for localized cancers. Recent promising results with neoadjuvant Nivolumab in MSI-high CRC suggest our technology could significantly enhance the delivery of anti-PD1 therapies in early-stage colorectal cancer