SFA Founders and Temple University Professors Drs. Mark Feitelson and Alla Arzumanyan are using substances produced by the body to treat hepatitis, liver disease, and more.

Much ink has been spilled in recent years about the importance of gut biomes. It’s often reported that the balance of good bacteria in our digestive tracts can affect everything from the strength of our immune systems to our energy levels and mood. But that may only be scratching the surface of what’s possible with the molecules in our gut. Researchers are discovering that gut metabolites may have broader applications, like being used to treat conditions affecting other parts of the body including the skin, the liver, and the colon.

SFA Therapeutics Inc., co founded by the Temple University researchers Mark Feitelson and Alla Arzumanyan, is drawing upon gut metabolites to treat disease and to advance our understanding of just how wide-ranging their applications may be. “The idea first came to me in about 2013,” Feitelson, a professor of biology in Temple’s College of Science and Technology, says. “We came across a scientific article about using bacterial metabolites to treat mice with colitis. And I thought, that’s very interesting. You can give these things to a mouse orally, and it acts in the intestine; but what about everywhere else?”

Dr. Mark Feitelson

In his research, Feitelson saw promising results in using metabolites to treat viral hepatitis and chronic liver disease. “It turns out a lot of the bad players involved in inflammation in the liver overlap with the bad players elsewhere,” Feitelson says. It was Arzumanyan’s idea to attempt treating psoriasis. In phase one trials, 92% of patients experienced improvement, and the team now has an array of patents for their compounds. They are exploring treatments for rheumatoid arthritis, leukemia, and lung damage caused by COVID-19 infection, among other diseases.

One of the big advantages of SFA’s work is the potential for fewer side effects compared with traditional treatments. “The nice thing about these substances is we don’t have to optimize them, evolution already has. This is a fundamentally different way of thinking about how to discover and develop drugs, and that’s why we think it’s also applicable to many different types of diseases,” Feitelson says. Compared to conventional drugs, SFA’s treatments act more harmoniously with the body. “The defining feature of our drug is modulation, rather than suppression,” Arzumanyan, an associate professor in Temple’s College of Science and Technology, says. “When big pharma companies design a drug, they usually pick a molecule and design a drug that suppresses it below the baseline, causing side effects. Our drug brings them back to what they should be normally.”

Learn more about Drs. Mark Feitelson and Alla Arzumanyan’s work to transform the treatment of autoimmune disorders and more.