Birmingham-based Alveolus Bio has been awarded a multimillion-dollar grant toward its research on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The grant is a Small Business Innovation Research FastTrack grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health. The SBIR program funds research and development work at small businesses to support early-stage growth. FastTrack grants fund Phase I and Phase II work over the course of three years.
This roughly $2.5 million FastTrack grant titled "An Inhaled Microbiome-Targeted Biotherapeutic for Treatment of COPD'' will support Alveolus's work on its lead program for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Alveolus Bio is one of the few Alabama-based therapeutics companies ever to have received a FastTrack award from NIH.
"This is key validation of our science, both current and planned, from the NIH," said Dr. C. Vivek Lal, founder of Alveolus Bio.
Alveolus also recently received favorable FDA feedback on the inhalation of live biotherapeutics.
"These funds will support first of its kind inhaled biotherapeutics development at our company laboratories in collaboration with labs at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In addition, we are in the middle of raising a Series A equity financing round to advance our assets into clinical trials," Lal said.
The initial technology behind the assets at Alveolus Bio were created at and exclusively licensed from Lal's lab at UAB.
"This is a prime time to partner with Alveolus as our new modality and route of administration are a game-changing combination," said Gaurav Mehta, COO of Alveolus Bio. "We are also open to strategic partnerships and other forms of business development to advance our novel inhaled drug platform across new applications and therapeutic axes."
