MaaT Pharma partners with Skyepharma on microbiome production

French biotech MaaT Pharma (Euronext: MAAT) has entered into a partnership agreement with contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) Skyepharma to build what to date will be France’s largest specialized cGMP manufacturing facility for ecosystem microbiome-based therapeutics.

The news pushed Maat Pharma shares up 7.8% to 12.45 euros by late morning. The company is part of an early wave of firms focused on researching the microbiome to develop new medicines, along with the likes of Ferring, EnteroBiotix and many more.

The facility, located near Lyon (Saint-Quentin-Fallavier) will boast an initial area of 1,500 square meters, that could be increased to 3,000 square meters depending on MaaT Pharma's manufacturing needs. The plant will allow MaaT Pharma to increase its manufacturing capacities ten-fold in order to support clinical and commercial development by 2030. The facility will aim to annually produce several thousand enemas of the Company’s lead candidate (MaaT013) dedicated to Graft-versus-Host disease and several hundreds of thousands capsules of its second drug candidate (MaaT033) designed to improve survival in patients receiving allogeneic stem cell transplantation.