Introduction of industry precompetitive consortium to promote microbiome based drug discovery in Japan

Abstract

With the advent of next-generation sequencers and subsequent large national projects by the U.S. and Europe, scientific information and knowledge have been dramatically accumulated on the microbiome and data associated with various diseases. Ever since the surprising highly successful efficacy of refractory C. difficile infectious disease by fecal microbiota transplantation is reported, microbiome modulation has been expected as a new approach for drug discovery. Therefore, lots of microbiome drug discovery ventures have sprung up and clinical pipelines in late-stage clinical development have already been created especially in U.S. and Europe. Unfortunately, Japan is lagging behind U.S. and Europe., as is often the case with other modalities such as the genome-based drug discovery. However, since pioneering research on gut microbiota began in Japan and has since been highly successful, the establishment of a domestic microbiome drug discovery infrastructure is long overdue. Under this environment, the Japan Microbiome Consortium, a general incorporated association established in 2017 to promote the industrial application of microbiome research, has been promoting pre-competitive collaborative activities with the participation of more than 30 domestic companies, including pharmaceutical companies, to build the microbiome drug discovery infrastructure. The consortium has been working on the construction of a drug discovery ecosystem that will lead to (1) a reliable measurement platform, (2) microbiome data in the healthy gut, and (3) microbiome drug discovery, by utilizing government projects. In this paper, we introduce the consortium and its activities to promote industrialization through pre-competitive collaborative activities.