BiomX Ltd, a microbiome company developing both natural and engineered phage therapies, announced yesterday that it has completed construction of a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.

The new facility is situated at the company's headquarters in Ness Ziona and it will support clinical manufacturing of the company's candidate phage products and in the future could be expanded to support commercial manufacturing needs. It has been designed to support the necessary manufacturing requirements for the company's future clinical development, including the manufacturing of BX002, a drug candidate phage cocktail that is intended to target bacterial strains that potentially have a role in the onset and aggravation of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), for which clinical trials are expected to start in 2020.

Jonathan Solomon, BiomX's CEO, said, 'In this new age of live biotherapeutics, which include phage as well as human-derived cells and bacteria, manufacturing has become a major step on the path to clinical development. Owning and operating our own manufacturing facility provides us with a competitive advantage by allowing close oversight and control, thus enhancing our ability to meet our manufacturing needs in a timely manner. Moreover, the ability to quickly and flexibly respond to new pre-clinical and clinical data allows us to modify our phage cocktails accordingly.'