Company Highlights:

• Ancilia is a computational bio-platform company that engineers phage-resistant bacterial therapeutics utilizing CRISPR/Cas to treat microbiome-linked diseases including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and immunotherapy-associated colitis. 
• Multiple $1B+ Markets. Platform allows for rapid expansion into many disease areas, including: Inflammatory Bowel Disease ($9B, initial target market) and immunotherapy-associated colitis ($4B+).
• Strong Foundational Science. Predicated on years of academic research at Harvard, WashU, Weill Cornell, and NC State, the team has demonstrated early proof-of-concept that phages may play a critical role in the development of microbiome-associated diseases, suggesting that engineered bacteria administered as a therapeutic may combat phage predators and restore the healthy state of the microbiome.
• Tech Advantage: Only company in the field that is specifically immunizing bacteria against gut phages to alter the microbiome and treat disease. Ancilia has a proprietary platform that allows them to identify virulent phage populations present in the gut, and patent-pending technologies to engineer and  develop these phage-resistant bacterial therapies. 
• Traction: Successfully identified specific phage targets in patients with IBD which attack beneficial bacterial strains. Ancilia has further identified and characterized novel CRISPR-Cas systems present in these bacterial strains, which can then be used to engineer bacterial immunity against the identified phage populations and develop a novel therapeutic for IBD.
• Near-term Value Inflection. Use of proceeds from this round will fund in vivo proof-of-concept experiments to demonstrate that phage-resistant bacteria have significantly improved colonization potential relative to standard bacterial therapies (this data will lay the foundation for raising a Series A round).
• Premier Founding Team & Partners. Founding team has venture capital experience and 30+ years in CRISPR engineering (one of Ancilia's co-founder is a co-founder of Intellia Therapeutics, NASDAQ: NTLA, $1B+ market cap) in academia and industry.

Ancilia Presentation and Q&A with CEO Alexandra Sakatos

Click here for Ancilia's Investor Presentation!

Click here for written Q&A Ancilia's CEO, Alex Sakatos!

Investment Thesis

What can classic literature teach us about the gut microbiome? 

As Leo Tolstoy said in Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." If you think about your microbiome as one big family, then healthy guts are generally alike (even if the exact composition of the microbiome varies from person-to-person), however, each unhealthy microbiome is unhealthy in it's own way.

While the vast majority of microbiome companies aim to add healthy bacteria back into the microbiome to treat disease, these approaches are missing half the picture. Why? Because viruses make up at least half of the organisms in the human gut!

This is important since changes in the composition of the gut microbiome have been linked to a number of chronic diseases, including inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which affects nearly 2 million people in the U.S.

Ans here's where Ancilia fits into the picture.....

Ancilia is developing a platform technology to enable the development of phage-resistant bacterial therapeutics (viruses that attack bacteria are called bacterial phages). In other words, Ancilia is engineering bacteria to be resistant to the nasty little virus that wreck havoc on the otherwise healthy bacteria that resides in your gut! Pretty cool, huh?

Anicila's does this by harnessing the natural adaptive immune system in bacteria, the CRISPR-Cas system, to engineer bacterial immunity against the virulent phage populations in the gut. This technology may enable the development of the first and only known therapeutic class that can robustly and specifically target and destroy these gut viruses. 

Quick Primer: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is an umbrella term used to describe disorders that involve chronic inflammation of your digestive tract. Types of IBD include:

- Ulcerative colitis. This condition causes long-lasting inflammation and sores (ulcers) in the innermost lining of your large intestine (colon) and rectum.

- Crohn's disease. This type of IBD is characterized by inflammation of the lining of your digestive tract, which often spreads deep into affected tissues.  

Furthermore, imbalances in microorganisms such as firmicutes, bacteroidetes, and actinobacteria have been linked to the development of diabetes, arthritis, and other neurological disorders. In addition, research has shown that long-term use of antibiotics, unhealthy lifestyle, and increasing age reduce the number of beneficial microorganisms in the human body.

Ancilia's approach (for which it has IP protection) enables them to profile an individual’s microbiome vial fecal analysis and screen for relevant bacterial phage targets, then functionally engineer bacteria via CRISPR/Cas to be resistant to them. If Ancilia can computationally screen and identify the phages associated with a particular disease, they can effectively engineer bacteria to resist these phages and prevent the destruction of healthy bacteria, thereby ultimately restoring microbiota equilibrium and potentially curing these diseases.

We have a broad platform for IP generation:

- Compositions and Methods for Microbiome Modulation, Covers methods and compositions of phage resistant bacteria to treat microbiome-linked diseases (Provisional filed Sept. 2019).

- We have identified unique endogenous CRISPR systems in commensal bacteria, plan to file provisional application for their use towards development of phage resistant bacteria by April 2020.

- Our discovery pipeline allows for rapid identification of novel phage targets and CRISPR systems across different indications, enabling us to build a deep IP portfolio.

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