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5 Best Microbiome Companies (March 2024)
The Importance of Microbiomes
Microbiomes are the community of bacteria present in an environment. It usually comprises hundreds if not thousands of different species interacting with each other in complex ways.
Most of the time, when people speak of microbiomes, they speak of the human gut microbiome. It is essential for our health and can be the source of multiple medical issues, from mere discomfort to life-threatening ailments. This is especially relevant for metabolic and inflammatory diseases.
But this can also be the microbiome of the soil, an essential component of soil fertility and agricultural yields.
In 2021, microbiome companies had collectively raised $1.6B in capital in just 2 years, mostly from VC funds.
The strength of microbiome companies is to leverage living organisms that already contribute to a person’s good health. So they mostly work with something that is naturally going in the direction of being therapeutical.
The problem can be that living organisms are very complex and can be hard to control or optimized to deliver a predictable and consistent health effect. This is why the sector is only possible to use as therapeutics now, thanks to genomic science progress allowing researchers to perform full microbiome genome analysis in the last 10 years.
Top 5 Microbiome Biology Companies Selection
This top 5 has been created to highlight companies following the criteria below.
(This is not investment advice. Order is by valuation and might not reflect the relative quality of the companies.)
- Publicly traded.
- Actively exclusively or mostly on the microbiome, which excludes large companies active in the field but without a central focus on the topic.
- Have a good track record of innovation in the field.
- Good successful product development track record, either already commercialized/licensed or supported by reputable partners.
- Reasonable expectations are that it could commercialize a product from its current R&D efforts.
(An exception was made for Finch Therapeutics due to the potential value of its pre-clinical portfolio and its large cash balance).
1. Finch Therapeutics
