NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) — BiomX announced today that it has partnered with Janssen Research & Development to discovery microbiome-based biomarkers that can help identify responders to a Janssen inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treatment.
Under the terms of the deal, the companies will use BiomX's XMarker platform to stratify responders and non-responders to an undisclosed Janssen IBD therapeutic. The XMarker platform combines DNA analysis, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing to identify predictive microbial genomic signatures with potential as biomarkers.
Israel-based BiomX said that the alliance was facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation, a strategic arm of Johnson & Johnson — the parent company of Raritan, New Jersey-based Janssen — and a BiomX investor. Additional terms were not disclosed.
"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," BiomX CEO Jonathan Solomon said in a statement. "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."