Coronado Biosciences (CNDO) uses Trichuris suis ova to treat autoimmune diseases, putting the hypothesis of autoimmune diseases being caused by too much hygiene to the test and currently posting encouraging clinical data, says Dr. Finny Kuruvilla, Portfolio Manager at Eventide Funds.
“The basic thesis behind Coronado is that there has been an explosion in the Western world in all sorts of autoimmune diseases. That includes diseases like multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, type I diabetes and psoriasis,” Kuruvilla said. “Interestingly, when you go into the developing world, places like India, you generally find those diseases are much less common — yet if you take a person from India and they immigrate, say, to the United States, you’ll find that they begin to assume the incidence of the host population. So it’s more than just a genetic phenomenon.”
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CNDO is close to $300 million in market cap and is a core holding of Kuruvilla’s health care portfolio, a company he says is underfollowed and underowned. He adds that the choice of TSO as a colonizing organism is because it cannot colonize the human body permanently, and it cannot be transferred from human to human.
“They did these pilot studies with TSO and saw impressive effects in inflammatory bowel disease, in ulcerative colitis, and there was a very small multiple sclerosis study that was run. The company is currently running a larger randomized study in Crohn’s disease that’s going to come out later this year, in second half of 2013, and if those read out positive, then this could be one of the big game changers that patients and physicians have seen,” Kuruvilla said.
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