Treatment for Inflammation

About

Background: Obesity has become an epidemic worldwide; in the United States alone, two-thirds of the adult population was overweight and half were obese in 2010. Obesity is often the major contributor to many other chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart attack, stroke and even cancer. Recent research has found that a bacterium called Enterobacter cloacae B29 has the ability to cause obesity and chronic inflammation in patients when it colonizes the gut. This technology is a potential alternative treatment to eliminate such harmful obesity-inducing bacteria that uses bacteriophages (phages), which are viruses that exclusively infect specific bacterial species without infecting human cells or good gut bacteria, to target and eliminate this and other harmful microbes in the gut. This invention consists of cocktails of one or more phages that can specifically target and kill E. cloacae B29 and other harmful gut bacteria species, which cocktails could be administered orally as a food product or nutritional supplement. About the Market: The high demand for anti-obesity drugs has created a market worth around $1.06 billion and is expected to reach $3.51 billion by 2021 and $24.06 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 38.7% and 27.1% over the next five and ten years respectively. This rapid growth will likely be due to the accelerating prevalence of obesity worldwide. Owing to the increasing prevalence of obesity, the degree of competition among players in the anti-obesity drugs market has been on the rise. Companies have been heavily investing in the development of agents with increased weight-loss efficacy and a high safety threshold to increase their chances of approval from regulatory bodies such as the US FDA. A phage therapy using the current invention’s technology thus presents a safe and effective way to target harmful obesity-inducing bacteria in the stomach without the harmful or complicated side effects other drugs on the market may present. Along with the promise of a successful and timely approval process, licensees of this technology will gain a strategic first mover advantage by being one of the first manufacturers to introduce an anti-obesity phage therapy into the market.