Takeda leads Big Pharma in microbiome-targeting treatments

Japan’s largest drugmaker Takeda (TYO: 4502) is currently developing multiple microbiome-targeting agents through a number of collaborations with innovative small companies.

Its latest partnership with Finch Therapeutics (Nasdaq: FNCH) to advance FIN-524, a microbiome-targeting drug candidate for the treatment of ulcerative colitis (UC), into clinical development under the new name TAK-524, demonstrates Takeda’s commitment to pursuing novel microbiome-targeting therapeutic approaches in the treatment of gastrointestinal diseases and cements its role as the leading Big Pharma player within this growing field, says data and analytics company GlobalData.

“One of the first relationships that Takeda entered into was with Finch Therapeutics in April 2017 for the joint development of TAK-524 for UC. TAK-524 was Finch’s first Rationally Selected Microbiota (RSM) therapy, a treatment comprised of select bacteria that demonstrated promising results in fecal microbiota transplantation human studies,” commented GlobalData’s immunology analyst Chris Pilis, adding: “The partnership between Takeda and Finch developed further after November 2019, when Finch granted Takeda access to its proprietary discovery platform for targeting Crohn’s disease (CD) and then began collaborating on the CD-specific microbiome-targeting candidate, FIN-525, which is currently in preclinical development.”