Q: What is the core problem that Felix Biotechnology is aiming to solve?
Dr. Paul Turner: The work at Felix derives from my lab’s interest in understanding how bacteria evolve in response to changes in their environment, and in particular, in response to antibiotic drugs. This evolved resistance is a growing threat to our healthcare system and has the potential to cause pandemic-level problems, not just for bacterial infections but for all interventions that require antibiotics (like surgeries, chemotherapies, etc). The WHO estimates that by 2050, 10M people will die per year of drug-resistant bacterial infections. Our current arsenal of antibiotic drugs is not enough to prevent this crisis, and recent efforts to develop new antibiotic drugs have been stymied. We need new tools to treat these deadly infections and prevent the spread of drug-resistant bacteria.
Q: That’s an incredibly important issue! What is Felix’s solution to this problem?
Dr. Robert McBride: While existing antibiotics are small molecule drugs, we are taking a different approach by harnessing the natural enemies of bacteria: bacteriophage, or phage. These are viruses that specifically infect and kill bacteria, and they were discovered before antibiotics and have long been posited to be an alternative way to treat infections. However, given the relative ease of small molecule drugs, research into phage therapy has lagged behind, and it is only now that we have the tools (including tools like CRISPR which allow us to effectively engineer lytic viruses) necessary to truly turn phage into an effective treatment option.
Q: What were the initial insights from the research done at Yale that served as the basis for Felix’s technology?
Dr. Paul Turner: We were studying how bacteria evolve in response to phage attack. Like with antibiotic drugs, bacteria can evolve resistance to phage, and also similarly, evolving resistance often requires a tradeoff, meaning that for the bacteria to gain resistance they must lose some other trait in the process. We asked the question whether we could identify phages that could either 1) kill drug-resistant bacteria, or 2) if the bacteria did evolve resistance to the phage, it forced a tradeoff that resulted in the loss of drug resistance or a decrease in bacterial virulence, hence making the infection less deadly. From this research, which was led by a scientist in my group named Ben Chan, we identified three phages that could drive these advantageous tradeoffs in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the most common multi-drug resistant bacteria in the world. While we’ve launched a small clinical trial called CY-PHY to test the efficacy of these phages in cystic fibrosis patients with chronic P. aeruginosa lung infections, we realized that to take these phages and turn them into a widely available, accessible treatment, we would need to found a company.
Q: How is Felix building off this foundational work?
Dr. Robert McBride: We’ve licensed the IP of the three phages in the CY-PHY clinical trial, but we aren’t stopping there. We are super-charging this approach by incorporating machine learning and synthetic biology to create a platform to build phage with optimal properties like the ability to drive these clinically-meaningful tradeoffs. We believe our ability to effectively engineer evolution will be key to advancing phage technology.
Q: What are the biggest hurdles for taking this technology from the lab to the clinic?
Dr. Robert McBride: We are in the midst of an exciting Series A raise and these funds will help us transform how phage therapy is delivered. Today, phage therapy is only available as a highly bespoke, personalized treatment at a limited number of healthcare centers, like Yale New Haven Hospital. Our Series A will help us to create a generalized, effective therapy that will expand access to phage therapy to the broader population. This is particularly important given that the highest burden of drug-resistant bacteria is in developing nations. We want to live in a world where bacterial infections are no longer a threat to our global health.
