Prokarium CEO Kristen Albright.
When one hears the word Salmonella, the immediate association might be food poisoning, or even eggs; for BCG vaccine, the pair would usually be tuberculosis. These couplings are some of the most storied links of disease etiology and treatment in biomedical history, yet even these connections are not all that they may seem on the surface — and London-based biopharma company Prokarium is poised to challenge these various paradigms with the recent announcement of their $30 million financing round led by Flerie Invest, fresh off the announcement of a new partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks.
With its evolutionarily optimized Salmonella strain chassis, Prokarium’s flagship “living medicine” bacteria-based immunotherapy program aims to move forward in the fight against bladder cancer — for which BCG is currently standard-of-care. While the company is approaching treatment in its first patient this year, “what truly inspires the team at Prokarium is our aim to design the perfect bacterium to create living cures for difficult-to-treat cancers,” says CEO Kristen Albright. “Taming a bacterium and leveraging millions of years of evolution to lead the way for a new generation of oncology therapies is a cool idea, one not many biotech companies are working on.”
This microbial immunotherapy system created by the engineered strain of Salmonella stands to particularly benefit patients suffering with bladder cancer with its potential to lyse cancer cells, counter tumor microenvironments, bolster anti-tumor host immune responses, and deliver a variety of therapeutic payloads in the form of custom synthetic circuits — based on the ingrained tumor-colonizing features of the organism. Over 500,000 cases of the disease are diagnosed globally per year; it typically presents in a non-muscle invasive form and is diagnosed early, yet despite treatment with BCG many patients risk disease recurrence. However, the Prokarium platform aims to create a new generation of immunotherapies for conditions beyond bladder cancer, as many immunotherapies fail to address immune dysfunction related to cancer disease and a large patient population stands to benefit from countering this problem. The Salmonella system is also intended to be used as an oral immune training agent to recover the range of a patient’s immune response to counter tumor growth across cancer types.
While Prokarium’s bacterial technology sets it apart and is strengthened by a background in vaccine clinical research, Albright has worked as CEO since 2021 to assemble a high-caliber team to enable the company’s transition into the oncology, which will be crucial for the company to carefully navigate the various challenges associated with microbial immunotherapy. “Bacteria-based immunotherapy began with Coley’s toxin over a century ago,” she explains. “However, progress was hindered by limited understanding of immunology and the absence of DNA engineering technology. Today, with improved knowledge and tools, the challenge is to change the perception of live bacteria as a viable cancer treatment option.”
These key elements of the journey ahead stand in relief against the various toxicity and targeting challenges sometimes faced by viral delivery for similar gene therapy systems. Enabled particularly by this funding round and the company’s new partnership with cell programming powerhouse Ginkgo Bioworks, announced January 9, 2023. Prokarium aims to harness the utility of bactofection — “infecting” mammalian cells with a genetic payload, in this instance RNA, through bacteria like Salmonella. “Our partnership with Ginkgo Bioworks opens the door to their Foundry and extensive Codebase [and allows us to] harnessing advanced synthetic circuits to reprogram our proprietary bacteria,” explains Albright, as the two companies seek to make this bactofection platform a reality in pursuit of evolution-enabled, next-generation cancer therapeutics.
In other words, the next time you think Salmonella, think Prokarium. These bacteria may cause food poisoning in one form, but engineered the right way can become living medicine — turning not fuel into fire but fire into fuel.
Thank you to Aishani Aatresh for additional research and reporting on this article. I’m the founder of SynBioBeta and some of the companies I write about, including Ginkgo Bioworks, are sponsors of the SynBioBeta conference and weekly digest.
