Pipeline

Moving fast to save millions of lives

Lumen believes biologic drugs offer the fastest, safest and most effective way to treat many prevalent diseases that traditional biopharma tools have failed to solve. These cures are especially well suited to addressing the unintended consequences of antibiotics and to the developing world, where a lack of infrastructure makes traditional drugs unavailable to millions of vulnerable children and adults.

Product Candidate

C. difficile Colitis

(Clostridioides difficile)

Mode of action: Cocktail of biologics in two formats

Initiated Spring 2018

Phase 1

Traditionally considered a hospital-acquired infection, C. difficile is increasingly arising in the broader community. For this reason, the shelf-stable, orally delivered format of Lumen’s product is an important addition to the tool kit for treating and preventing this disease. Long-term consequences can include chronic diarrhea, severe intestinal inflammation, surgical resection, and death. Insidiously, the very thing that is used to treat this infection—broad spectrum antibiotics—is also the thing that causes the disease. C. difficile therefore appears at the top of the CDC’s antimicrobial threats list year after year, and in 2009 was estimated to single-handedly drive 2.3% of all US hospital costs.

Product Candidate

Covid-19

(SARS-CoV-2)

Mode of action: Neutralizing antibody cocktail

Initiated Summer 2020

IND Prep

Covid-19 is widely known as a respiratory disease, but its GI symptoms are well documented. The now-famous ACE2 receptor is abundantly expressed on the cells lining the GI tract, and over half of Covid-19 sufferers show symptoms of GI distress, and up to a quarter show only GI symptoms. GI infection by the virus can have serious long-term effects, and high enteric viral loads are thought to contribute to fatalities from acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and wet-lung disease. Lumen’s Covid-19 product is designed to block GI infection and rapidly flush the virus from the GI tract, thereby reducing disease symptoms and potentially reducing transmission rates.

Product Candidate

IBD

(Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis)

Mode of action: Biologic cocktail

Initiated Summer 2021

Preclinical

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a systemic autoimmune disease, but it has an obvious nexus with the gastrointestinal tract. The two main sub-varieties—Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis—have many available treatments on the market today, but it remains a major unmet medical need: current treatments are costly, require inconvenient injection delivery, and come with severe side effects. There are no approved therapies at all for mild-to-moderate Crohn’s. A safe, affordable, orally delivered drug to root out IBD at its source is a straightforward application of Lumen's technology, and would constitute a major advance for the field.

Product Candidate

Metabolic Disease

(Cardiometabolic Disease)

Mode of action: Metabolic signaling

Initiated Summer 2021

Preclinical

Cardiometabolic disease (CMD)—a cluster of related conditions that includes obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease—afflicts hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and the associated health and economic burdens continue to grow. An estimated 17.9 million people died from CMD in 2019, representing nearly a third of all global deaths. Of these deaths, 85% were due to heart attack and stroke. Today, over three quarters of deaths from cardiovascular diseases take place in low- and middle-income countries. Lumen is collaborating with Novo Nordisk, a global leader in CMD, to develop metabolically active molecules produced and delivered using spirulina.

Product Candidate

Traveler’s Diarrhea

(C. jejuni & E. coli)

Mode of action: Neutralizing antibody cocktail

Initiated 2018

Phase 2

Supported in part by funding from CARB-X and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumen’s traveler’s diarrhea product is a cocktail of neutralizing monoclonal antibody-like protein biologics designed to bind and neutralize the primary causes of traveler’s diarrhea: the bacterial pathogens Campylobacter jejuni and enterotoxigenic E. coli. In addition to making life miserable for travelers and deployed servicemen and -women, they are a major cause of infant mortality and morbidity in the developing world. Lumen is committed to working with the Gates Foundation and other global health advocates to make these products available in the developing world, regardless of ability to pay.

Our future target initiatives span a range of diseases.

GI Autoimmune Diseases

Autoimmune diseases of the GI tract—including celiac disease, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease—present large unmet needs in the developed world. Some therapies now exist, particularly for the inflammatory subset of these diseases, but they suffer from attenuated efficacy over time, and significant side effects. For example, systematically dampening the immune system as systemic anti-TNF alpha drugs do, is associated with higher rates of infection and cancer. The delivery of affordable biologic drugs to the site of disease origin could be a game-changer for many of these persistent disorders.

Metabolic Diseases

Metabolic diseases have been a persistent concern for health experts in developed countries for decades, and have become a growing concern for many developing countries as well, as economic development gives rise to wider adoption of Western diets. There is an obvious connection to events in the GI tract, but small molecule drugs are ill-suited to intervene in this area due to their lack of specificity, and biologics—though possessing the required specificity—are far too expensive to manufacture for the most plausible treatment scenarios. Lumen’s platform offers a way to address these diseases in a way that is both targeted and affordable.

Other Long-Term Targets

Once drug developers come to fully appreciate the unique advantages of cost-efficient, orally delivered biologics, the number of potential druggable targets in the GI tract becomes overwhelming. To cite one example, an enormous amount of research has emerged in recent years linking dysbiosis — a disturbance in the normal composition of the commensal bacteria colonizing the human GI tract—to a wide variety of diseases, some of which manifest themselves far from the intestines. By their nature, intervening in any of these will require a precision approach: microbiome sculpting. And that precision will in turn require what Lumen’s platform is uniquely able to provide: large volumes of low-cost biologic drugs.

A pipeline full of preventative cures

Moving fast to save millions of lives

C. difficile Colitis

Covid-19

IBD

Metabolic Disease

Traveler’s Diarrhea

Our future target initiatives span a range of diseases.

GI Autoimmune Diseases

Metabolic Diseases

Other Long-Term Targets