Neobe: Battling Cancer With Safe Bacteria (220)

Neobe Therapeutics is an early-stage startup engineering safe recombinant bacterial products to enable immune infiltration in solid tumors. Their bacterial products combine innate tumor colonization with genetically engineered inducible biosensors to disrupt tumor microenvironment barriers to infiltration. By enabling successful infiltration of immune excluded tumors using our bacterial products they will be able to multiply the number of patients that respond to existing immunotherapies, with a focus on checkpoint inhibitors. 

Neobe was formed in January 2021 in London, UK with the support of Deep Science Ventures and Cancer Research UK. The founding team is made up of Dr. Pedro Correa de Sampaio, a cancer biologist with a successful career studying the tumor microenvironment in top academic institutions in the UK and the US; and Dr. Annelise Soulier, a microbiologist and molecular biologist with several years of experience engineering bacteria for therapeutic applications in one of the top UK companies in the field, having authored patents in the field and developed products that are currently in clinical trials. The founding team has the support of a world class advisory board, including top academic researchers and former C-level industry executives in the field. 

It was selected for the 2021 cohort of the highly prestigious Accelerate@Babraham in Cambridge, UK, won the London branch of the Imagine IF! healthcare startup competition and Neobe’s co-founder Annelise Soulier was a finalists of the AIM-HI Women’s Venture Competition. 

During its first year, Neobe developed the genetic tools necessary for the generation of its initial prototype, and established collaborations with top academic institutions such as the Barts Cancer Institute to initiate efficacy studies. Neobe was also recently awarded a collaborative Innovate UK Biomedical Catalyst grant, from the UK government, for the development of its second product at a total project cost of £505K.