Biomica Ltd., an Israel-based clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, and a subsidiary of Evogene Ltd. (Nasdaq: EVGN) (TASE: EVGN), announced on Tuesday that it has dosed its first patient in its phase one clinical trial aimed mainly at assessing the safety and tolerability of the company's microbiome-based immuno-oncology drug candidate, BMC128, in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) immunotherapy, in patients with either non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), melanoma or renal cell carcinoma (RCC).

The immune checkpoint inhibitor in the trial is Bristol Myers Squibb's Opdivo.

BMC128 is a rationally designed microbial consortium found and chosen via a detailed functional microbiome analysis utilising PRISM, a proprietary high-resolution microbiome analysis platform powered by Evogene's MicroBoost AI platform. It is developed as a Live Bacterial Product (LBP) and is an LBP consortium that includes four unique bacterial strains, natural inhabitants of the human intestinal tract, that harbour specific functional capabilities with the potential to improve immunological therapeutic responses and facilitate anti-tumour immune activity through multiple biological processes.

Biomica aims to identify and characterize disease-related microbiome entities and to develop novel therapeutics based on these understandings.