RondinX Expands its Microbiome Computational Platform for Drug Development with a Unified Reference Range of Bacterial Dynamics Based on Database of 1,400 Healthy Individuals

RondinX, an emerging pioneer in intelligent microbiome drug development, today announced the conclusion of the first phase of its benchmarking project to establish a comprehensive database of microbiome growth dynamic ranges from healthy individuals. The aim of the project is to provide a reference point to guide future drug discovery and development programs of RondinX and its partners towards disease-causing or disease-modulating microbes. As of today, RondinX has analyzed shotgun metagenomic data sets from 1,400 healthy individuals thereby strengthening its existing microbiome drug discovery and development platform.

“The human microbiome is not static but rather a highly dynamic ecosystem with thousands of species and billions of microbial organisms each growing or shrinking in a specific range and pattern that can be considered healthy. Our platform has proven to be extremely sensitive to various types of perturbations of this balance and establishing a pool of healthy human reference microbiomes supports RondinX and partners in identifying active “driver” and “modulator” species of diseases,” said Guy Harmelin, co-founder and CEO of RondinX.

RondinX applies a novel approach to discovering how the human microbiome affects health and disease, which was established at the Weizmann Institute of Science and exclusively licensed to RondinX from its commercial arm YEDA Research and Development Company Ltd. By predicting microbial growth dynamics from single metagenomic samples, the Company’s cloud-based technology platform adds a new dimension to the microbiome drug development process. Using this approach, scientists at the Weizmann Institute were able to link certain members of the microbiome community and specific diseases states. The results, which were published in SCIENCE in 2015, indicated that type II diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease are uniquely associated with changes in bacterial growth rates. These links could not be observed in the static microbiome population studies based on relative frequency, and therefore, unveiled unique targets for drug discovery that would have remained invisible to other approaches.

About RondinX:

Founded in 2016 by leading microbiome experts, RondinX has built a cutting-edge microbiome technology platform set to unlock the potential of microbiome therapeutics. RondinX technology, including its PTR (Peak-to-Trough) family of algorithms, exclusively licensed from YEDA (the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science), is a proprietary, cloud-based, computational pipeline, integrating raw metagenomics, other omics and patient metadata to derive both static and dynamic strain level insights into the bacterial ecosystem.

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