Stoked Bio Licenses Crohn's Disease Therapy

- The therapy, Enterololin, is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that specifically targets *adherent-invasive E. coli* (AIEC), a bacterium linked to inflammation in Crohn's disease, while leaving beneficial gut microbes unharmed. - Its discovery involved a significant tech contribution from MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), which developed a generative AI model called DiffDock. This highlights the role of computational biologists, who design algorithms to predict molecular interactions. - The AI model predicted the drug's mechanism of action—how it binds to a bacterial protein complex called LolCDE—in just 100 seconds, a task that would traditionally take years and millions of dollars. This demonstrates how bioinformatics accelerates the initial, lab-based "Discovery Phase" of drug development. - Stoked Bio was co-founded by the therapy's lead researcher, Jonathan Stokes of McMaster University, to translate academic discoveries into clinical treatments. This founder role blends deep scientific expertise with business development to move a drug from the lab toward patient use. - Now that the therapy is licensed, Stoked Bio will lead the "Preclinical Phase," which involves rigorous safety and toxicity testing before an Investigational New Drug (IND) application can be filed with regulators to allow human trials. - If preclinical work is successful, the project will move into "Clinical Research," a patient-facing field where professionals manage clinical trials to test the drug's safety and effectiveness in hundreds or thousands of people. Stoked Bio aims to begin these human trials within three years. - Unlike many current Crohn's treatments, such as broad-spectrum antibiotics or immunomodulators that suppress the entire immune system, Enterololin is designed as a precision therapy to eliminate a specific bacterial trigger of the disease.