Daré Bioscience, a women’s health company, has announced the receipt of a $750K grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This funding is earmarked for the development of bacteria-based live biotherapeutic products, aiming to enhance the health of women and newborns globally.
This recent grant follows a previous award of approximately $585K from the foundation, granted to Daré in November 2022 for the development of a hydrogel formulation promoting vaginal health. The additional funds are designated to support Daré’s team in gathering and analyzing data on the global bacterial biologic supply chain. This effort is intended to assist the foundation in pinpointing potential Contract Manufacturing Organization (CMO) partners for the production of clinical and commercial supplies of bacteria-based biotherapeutic products.
“Daré was selected to conduct this landscape review given our proven ability to find, audit and recommend global manufacturers capable of commercial scale therapeutic production, as we have done for XACIATO (clindamycin phosphate) vaginal gel 2%. This work will benefit women and newborns as the primary patient populations for interventions where bacteria consortia products are an important modality in the therapeutic arsenal,” said David Friend, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer of Daré Bioscience. “As Daré continues to accelerate the development of differentiated products for women, we are grateful for the foundation’s continued support and look forward to applying our expertise to help the foundation identify global CMOs best-positioned to manufacture bacteria-based biotherapeutic products that could have a meaningful impact on the lives of women and newborns everywhere.”
