Chicago University (UChicago) has generated a new spinout, Gusto Global, that aims to better understand the behaviour of the human gut microbiome in order to develop more efficient drugs.
The company has been spun out by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, through its UCGo Startup License program, and is based on research conducted by Jack Gilbert and John Alverdy.
Gilbert is the faculty director at the Microbiome Center, a collaboration among Argonne National Laboratory, the Marine Biological Laboratory and UChicago. Alverdy is the executive vice-chair at the Department of Surgery and a professor of surgery.
Gusto Global will develop drugs that exploit the human gut microbiome, made up of some 30 trillion microbes that form a complex system believed to calibrate the immune system, affecting response to surgery as well as the likelihood of disease and mental health disorders.
The company has created a computational modelling platform, Gust+, that runs thousands of simulations in order to predict how those microbes interact with each other and impact the immune system. The simulations rely on databases from human studies.
The spinout has received an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the co-founders as well as investment bank Fennebresque & Co. The initial research by Gilbert and Alverdy was supported through a National Institutes of Health grant.
Gusto Global is currently collaborating with an unnamed pharmaceutical firm to optimise its probiotic formulations. The spinout is targeting a series A round this year.
Gilbert said: “We believe it may be possible to treat chronic and acute diseases like allergies, infections or irritable bowel disorder by delivering microbes – living micro-organisms – into your gut via a pill.
“These micro-organisms will interact with the patients’ immune system and the microbiome that is already in their gut to help reduce inflammation and wipe out disease-causing pathogens.”
