Tulane Ventures has invested $250,000 in Biophoundry, a Tulane University spinout co-founded by Rani Brooks and Sahan Liyanagedera. Brooks is a former Allan Colowick Innovation Fellow at the Tulane Innovation Institute, a grant recipient of the Provost's Proof of Concept Fund (PPOC) and a graduate of Tulane's Bioinnovation PhD program.

The company is developing engineered phage therapies that could provide new options for treating superbugs and other bacterial infections that no longer respond to antibiotics. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur each year in the U.S.

"Rani represents exactly what we hope to see from our fellows and PPOC recipients: deep science paired with discipline and know-how to build a company around it. This investment reflects our confidence in Biophoundry's novel approach and in Rani's ability to lead it," said Kimberly Gramm, managing director of Tulane Ventures and the David and Marion Mussafer Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at the Tulane Innovation Institute.

Phage therapy uses viruses that attack bacteria and have been studied for more than a century. The approach could help address antibiotic resistance, but developing and manufacturing phages for specific infections presents significant challenges. Traditional phage production requires growing live bacteria, creating potential contamination and manufacturing limitations.

Biophoundry has built a platform called Phax to engineer and produce targeted phages faster and more affordably than conventional methods. The technology is built on the company's underlying platform, coupling computational phage design and selection with rapid phage engineering. Two exclusively licensed patent families cover the cell-free synthesis method and the PHAX "engineering-first" approach, which outpaces bacterial evolution to create an evergreen pipeline of therapeutic phages.

Brooks and his co-founder Liyanagedera, who is based in the United Kingdom, met at the Society for Biological Engineering Cell-Free Systems conference in 2023 and began collaborating shortly thereafter, while Brooks began building Biophoundry at Tulane. With founders working on both sides of the Atlantic, the company has built relationships with investors, advisors and industry partners in the United States and the United Kingdom.

In addition to Brooks and Liyanagedera, the company has added three employees who are currently engineering phages to target chronic urinary tract infections (UTIs). Eventually, the company hopes to deliver custom phages for a range of difficult-to-treat infections, from topical phages for skin infections to catheter-based treatments for UTIs, to nebulizers for severe cases such as antibiotic-resistant pneumonia.

The investment from Tulane Ventures, along with other angel and investor funding, will help the team launch a healthcare provider partnership pilot with a regional hospital in the Gulf South and complete the preclinical research needed to file an Investigational New Drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as it advances its technology toward potential FDA approval.

Physicians who treat patients with antibiotic-resistant infections can sometimes run out of effective options. "We live in a world of increasing multidrug-resistant infections, and some are outstripping the ability of our armamentarium of antibiotics to treat and cure them. This scenario is expected to worsen over the coming decades. Phage therapy harnesses viruses that naturally attack and kill bacteria, but the traditional preparation time is measured in weeks to months, time that patients suffering from these infections don't have," said Dr. David Mushatt, a professor of medicine at the Tulane School of Medicine and an infectious disease specialist at LCMC Health.

"Biophoundry is taking phage therapy to the next level, engineering phages in days to precisely target a patient's bacteria in a multipronged attack. This novel approach to treating infections could be truly transformative," Mushatt said.

For Brooks, the investment carries a personal significance beyond the funding.

"Tulane is my alma mater and where all of my earliest milestones took place, from early support from my mentors Lisa Morici and Nicholas Sandoval to working with the Tulane Innovation Institute. Biophoundry was created at Tulane, and I am grateful for the continued support from Tulane Ventures," Brooks said.

Brooks began his research in cell-free bacteriophage synthesis with Lisa Morici, a microbiologist and immunologist at the School of Medicine, and Nicholas Sandoval, a synthetic biologist and chemical engineer at the School of Science and Engineering. The three co-authored a paper titled "Cell-Free Bacteriophage Synthesis from Engineered Strains Improves Yield," published in ACS Synthetic Biology in 2023.

The Tulane Ventures investment gives Biophoundry additional support as it moves its technology from the laboratory toward preclinical testing and, eventually, potential clinical use for patients with infections that have few effective treatment options remaining.