ConsortiaTX Co-Founder Awarded $1.5 Million National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant to Develop Innovations for Microbiome Studies for Food Allergies

Working at his lab at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Dr. Gerber and his team will develop innovative approaches to enable analyses of longitudinal microbiome studies. This work will enable prediction of microbiome population dynamics across larger ecosystems than possible with current tools and enable prediction of the disease status of people from measurements of the microbiome over time. Gerber’s work boosts interpretability and statistical power of longitudinal microbiome studies and creates new models that incorporate prior biological knowledge, including phylogenetic and metabolic relationships, ultimately allowing meaningful microbiome predictions to be made.

“We will develop improved machine learning models of microbial dynamics and the effects of the microbiome on the human host over time. Our goal is to increase the biological realism of models and accuracy of predictions, and also create practical open-source software tools to help move the field forward,” said ConsortiaTX co-founder Georg Gerber, M.D., Ph.D.

ConsortiaTX plans to incorporate the resulting open-source tools into its research pipelines as they are developed, leveraging Dr. Gerber’s advice on deploying and customizing these tools for the company’s objectives. These tools will allow ConsortiaTX to refine their lead food allergy therapy, CTX-944, and enhance interpretation of clinical results coming from ConsortiaTX’s upcoming phase 1B trial.

“The ultimate goal for ConsortiaTX is to develop therapeutics to reverse food allergies,” says Lynn Bry, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and a company founder who chairs the ConsortiaTX scientific advisory board (SAB). “The algorithmic approaches being developed will enhance the ability of ConsortiaTX and others to advance live biotherapeutic products to the clinic. Dr. Gerber’s expertise is a tremendous asset to the company as it integrates his tools for the development of CTX-944.”

About ConsortiaTX, Inc.

ConsortiaTX, Inc. is a biotherapeutic company developing therapies based on microbes and microbial products to prevent and treat human diseases. The company’s lead asset, CTX-944, is a live biotherapeutic product for the reversal of food allergy. www.consortiatx.com

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