Suono Bio, co-founded by MIT alumnus Carl Schoellhammer and two MIT professors, makes use of ultrasound waves to ship medicine to the gastrointestinal tract, leveraging analysis made in MIT labs over greater than three a long time. Credit score: iStockphoto, edited by MIT Information
Suono Bio, based by two MIT professors and an alumnus, is utilizing a confirmed know-how to spice up the therapy of gastrointestinal tract issues.
It may be troublesome to get medicine to illness websites alongside the gastrointestinal tract, which spans the mouth, esophagus, abdomen, small and enormous gut, and anus. Invasive remedies can take hours as sufferers await sufficient quantities of medicine to be absorbed on the proper location. The identical downside is holding again newer remedies like gene-altering therapies.
Now the MIT spinout Suono Bio is advancing a brand new strategy that makes use of ultrasound to ship medicine, together with nucleic acids like DNA and RNA, to the GI tract extra successfully. The corporate believes its know-how can be utilized to get a broad array of therapeutic molecules into the areas of the physique which have confirmed most troublesome to drug.
“Ultrasound is a well known know-how that’s been used for many years within the clinic,” Suono co-founder and CTO Carl Schoellhammer PhD ’15 says. “However now we’re doing one thing actually distinctive and novel with it to facilitate the supply of issues that couldn’t be delivered earlier than.”
Suono’s know-how is the end result of greater than three a long time of discoveries made in MIT labs by researchers together with Schoellhammer and fellow Suono co-founders Robert Langer, who’s the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, and Giovanni Traverso, an assistant professor at MIT. The platform takes benefit of a phenomena wherein ultrasound waves create little jets in liquid that can be utilized to push medicine into cells.
The corporate’s first therapy program targets ulcerative colitis. Final week, Suono introduced a funding spherical to advance that program and others in its pipeline into medical trials.
Past that first program, the founders say the platform may very well be used to ship a variety of molecules, from nucleic acids to peptides and bigger proteins, to any a part of the GI tract. And though the primary iteration of Suono’s supply platform will leverage hand-held methods, the founders consider the know-how might in the future be contained in a battery-powered, ingestible capsule.
“That [first drug candidate] is the proof of idea the place we might probably clear up a really urgent medical downside and do numerous good for lots of sufferers,” Schoellhammer says. “However then you definitely’ve de-risked the entire platform, as a result of the trial is making use of ultrasound to a mucosal floor, and your whole GI tract is one massive mucosal floor. So, all the next merchandise that we do, even in different type components, will construct on one another.”
A discovery with promise
Schoellhammer was a PhD candidate in chemical engineering between 2010 and 2015. Throughout that point, he was co-advised by Daniel Blankschtein, the Herman P. Meissner Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Langer, who has co-founded over 40 corporations.
Langer and Blankschtein first found that ultrasound waves can be utilized to assist medicine go via the pores and skin in 1995. When ultrasound waves go via a fluid, they create tiny, imploding bubbles that, upon popping, create forces able to delivering medicine into cells earlier than the medicine degrade. Almost 20 years later, Schoellhammer and collaborators at MIT took that discovery a step additional by making use of two totally different beams of ultrasound waves to pores and skin concurrently to additional improve the cell-penetrating forces.
On the time, Traverso was a gastroenterology fellow on the Massachusetts Common Hospital finishing the analysis portion of his coaching in Langer’s lab. Schoellhammer, Traverso, and different collaborators determined to see if ultrasound might improve drug supply to the GI tract. “It appeared to work so properly on pores and skin we figured why not strive different locations within the physique,” Schoellhammer remembers.
Medicine sometimes should be encapsulated by a protecting coating to be delivered into the physique with out degrading. For the researchers’ first experiment, they mixed uncooked biologic medicine and ultrasound waves. To their shock, the medicine have been absorbed successfully by the GI tract. The strategy labored for the supply of proteins, DNA, RNA, and types of RNA utilized in remedies, resembling mRNA and siRNA.
“Lengthy story quick, we simply discovered that all the pieces works,” Schoellhammer says. “We might ship a broad vary of courses of medicine with out formulation. The GI tract is designed to soak up, however it usually absorbs small molecules. Something bigger, whether or not it’s biologics, proteins, gene therapies, are degraded as a result of on the identical time the GI tract is a really inhospitable atmosphere. It has a low pH and a wealth of proteases and nucleases to chew up all these molecules. So, supply of these kinds of compounds to the GI tract is sort of the holy grail.”
The breakthrough satisfied Schoellhammer the know-how might in the future enhance therapy choices for sufferers, and he went on to work with the Deshpande Heart for Technological Innovation, take part within the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competitors, obtain funding from The Engine funding fund, and embrace plenty of different academic experiences he says have been integral to beginning Suono.
“It’s mentors like Bob, mentors like Gio, with the ability to take courses at MIT’s enterprise college, working with the Know-how Licensing Workplace at MIT and attending to study from their perspective by way of what they’re in search of in defending know-how and interesting exterior teams, assist from the Deshpande Heart the place we received an early grant; I used to be additionally the recipient of the 2015 Lemelson-MIT Program’s pupil prize,” Schoellhammer says of the issues that helped his entrepreneurial journey. “With out all these items, Suono doesn’t exist, and the know-how doesn’t exist to hopefully in the future get to sufferers.”
Subsequent analysis confirmed the ultrasound supply methodology may very well be used to ship medicine wherever alongside the gastrointestinal tract. It additionally confirmed the medicine have been absorbed way more effectively and had extra constructive results than remedies that used different supply strategies.
“The breadth of molecules that may be delivered is extraordinarily uncommon for a drug supply know-how, in order that’s actually thrilling,” Traverso says. “These observations are additional bolstered by the recoveries we’ve seen when ultrasound has been utilized in GI illness fashions.”
Attending to sufferers
Suono expects to start medical trials within the subsequent 12 to 18 months. The founders consider getting one drug permitted won’t solely validate the efficacy of their strategy however simplify regulatory hurdles for future medicine, even when later remedies look a lot totally different from what’s being administered as we speak.
“Ultrasound might be packaged in many alternative type components, so it may very well be in a system that’s giving an enema, on an endoscope, or in a capsule,” Traverso says. “Utilizing ultrasound in all of these methods opens up many new alternatives. The work now’s figuring out the highest alternatives provided that so many issues may very well be executed.”
Along with inflammatory bowel illness, Suono is exploring remedies for a lot of different issues of the GI tract. The localized supply platform might make remedies of sure cancers, for instance, extra exact and efficient.
“Like every firm, we’ve to assume very onerous in regards to the logical lead indication,” Schoellhammer says. “And so, we’re beginning by focusing on ulcerative colitis. However that’s not the place we’re ending. That can construct the worth of the entire platform, which can in the end in the future be totally ingestible methods for oral supply of something: oral supply of biologics, oral supply of nucleic acids. It’s that long-term imaginative and prescient we’re centered on with this path.”
