BiomX Ltd., a microbiome company developing customized phage therapies, today announced that it has entered into a collaboration with Janssen Research & Development, LLC to utilize BiomX's XMarker microbiome-based biomarker discovery platform. The XMarker platform will be used to stratify responders and non-responders to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) therapeutics. The collaboration was facilitated by Johnson & Johnson Innovation Limited.

"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," stated Jonathan Solomon, CEO of BiomX. "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."

There is growing evidence that the composition of the microbiome is a promising predictive tool for disease and for patient response to therapy in conditions such as IBD, cancer and liver disease. BiomX's novel XMarker platform applies a unique metagenomics-based approach to decipher full microbial genomic signatures that can be further developed into predictive biomarkers. The platform combines ultra-high-resolution DNA analysis, machine-learning techniques and high-scale cloud computing resources to build classifiers of high sensitivity and specificity.

About Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)

Inflammatory bowel disease is a group of disorders that involve chronic inflammation of the digestive tract, which include Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. IBDs affect as many as 1.6 million Americans, most of whom are diagnosed before the age of 35. As many as 70,000 new cases of IBD are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. IBD can be debilitating and sometimes leads to life-threatening complications.

About BiomX

BiomX is a microbiome drug discovery company developing customized phage therapies that target and destroy harmful bacteria in chronic diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and cancer. We discover and validate proprietary bacterial targets and customize our natural and engineered phage compositions against these targets.

The Company's platforms use computational and synthetic biology and cutting-edge research from Profs. Rotem Sorek, Ph.D., Eran Elinav, M.D., Ph.D., and Eran Segal, Ph.D., of The Weizmann Institute of Science; and Professor Timothy K. Lu, M.D., Ph.D., of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Investors in the Company include OrbiMed Israel Incubator LP, Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation Inc., Takeda Ventures, Inc., Seventure Partners, Mirae Asset Global Investments, and SBI.

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