16 May 2019 - - US-based clinical-stage company Vedanta Biosciences has raised an additional USD 18.5m as an extension of its Series C financing, bringing the total for the round to USD 45.5m, the company said.

The new investment comes from JSR Corp., Shumway Capital, SymBiosis LLC, and Partners Investment Co., Ltd., who join previously disclosed investors the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Rock Springs Capital, Invesco Asset Management, Health for Life (Seventure Partners), and founder PureTech Health.

Proceeds from the financing will be used to advance Vedanta's clinical portfolio including a Phase 1/2 study of VE416 in food allergy, a Phase 1b/2 study of VE800 and Opdivo (nivolumab) in advanced or metastatic cancers, and the ongoing Phase 2 study of VE303 in recurrent Clostridium difficile infection.

A Phase 1 clinical study of VE202 in healthy volunteers is being advanced with Janssen as part of an ongoing collaboration in inflammatory bowel disease.

Vedanta Biosciences is developing consortia of bacterial strains designed to effect robust and durable therapeutic changes in a patient's gut microbiota.

In contrast to fecal transplants or administration of fecal fractions, Vedanta Biosciences' consortia are defined compositions of bacteria manufactured from pure, clonal cell banks, without the need to rely on direct sourcing of fecal donor material of inconsistent composition.

Vedanta Biosciences is a clinical-stage company developing a new category of therapies for immune-mediated diseases based on rationally-defined consortia of human microbiome-derived bacteria. Vedanta Biosciences is in the microbiome field with capabilities and deep expertise to discover, develop, and manufacture live bacteria drugs.

These include what is believed to be the largest collection of human-gut associated bacteria, a suite of proprietary assays to select pharmacologically potent strains, vast proprietary datasets from human interventional studies, and facilities for cGMP-compliant manufacturing of rationally-defined bacterial consortia in powder form.

Vedanta Biosciences' pioneering work, in collaboration with its scientific co-founders, has led to the identification of human commensal bacteria that induce a range of immune responses including induction of regulatory T cells, CD8+ T cells, and Th17 cells, among others.

These advances have been published in leading peer-reviewed journals, including Science (multiple), Nature (2013, 2019), Cell, and Nature Immunology. Vedanta Biosciences has harnessed these biological insights and its capabilities to generate a pipeline of programs in infectious disease, autoimmune disease, allergy, and immuno-oncology.

Vedanta Biosciences was founded by PureTech Health (LSE.PRTC). Its scientific co-founders are world-renowned experts in immunology and microbiology who have pioneered the fields of innate immunity, Th17 and regulatory T cell biology, and include Ruslan Medzhitov, Ph.D., (Yale and Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Brett Finlay, Ph.D., (University of British Columbia and HHMI), Kenya Honda, Ph.D., (Keio University and RIKEN), Dan Littman, Ph.D., (New York University and HHMI), Alexander Rudensky, Ph.D., (Sloan Kettering and HHMI), and Jeremiah Faith, Ph.D., (Mount Sinai School of Medicine).