CLEVELAND, OH – February 12, 2025 – Mobius Care, a Cleveland Clinic-founded company that is pioneering a new approach to precision medicine for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), today announced it has received funding from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. The Foundation is a non-profit organization committed to finding cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.
The funding will primarily be used to advance Mobius Care’s innovative H&E image-based predictive biomarker, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict patients’ responses to existing IBD therapies from standard-of-care H&E images. This biomarker is the first of its kind and offers the potential for a new tool for clinicians to personalize treatment plans for IBD patients.
“The Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation has been a valuable partner, and we greatly appreciate their early support of our efforts,” said Thaddeus Stappenbeck, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Inflammation and Immunity at Cleveland Clinic and founder of Mobius Care. “The Foundation recognizes the complexity of treating IBD, which affects 1 in 100 Americans. While precision medicine has made strides in other areas, progress in IBD has remained limited, with current therapies showing response rates as low as 50%. This uncertainty in treatment effectiveness highlights a pressing unmet need within the field. We look forward to building on our collaboration with The Foundation as Mobius works to advance precision diagnostics and develop innovative therapies that can transform the way IBD is treated and significantly improve patient outcomes.”
“IBD Ventures is excited to support Mobius, which is pioneering transformative technology that addresses critical unmet needs of IBD patients,” said Andrés Hurtado-Lorenzo, PhD, Senior Vice President of Translational Research and IBD Ventures at the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. “Currently, the patient journey in IBD lacks a systematic approach. Patients often cycle through various treatments – from steroids to different biologics and small molecules – without a clear way to predict which will be most effective. This digital pathology test has the potential to bring precision medicine to IBD care.”
Cristina Larkin, CEO of Mobius Care, stated, “Our focus has been on providing better solutions for patients suffering from IBD. Precision IBD has been a goal for both patients and healthcare providers, and we are excited about developing AI-supported solutions to guide the clinical selection of IBD therapeutics. We believe Mobius Care is prepared to be the first to offer a true precision medicine approach to IBD, and we are thrilled about our biomarkers and the expanding pipeline of therapeutics we are creating.”
About Mobius Care
Mobius Care is a precision medicine company focused on developing AI-powered biomarkers and therapeutics for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The company’s mission is to empower healthcare providers and patients to choose the most effective treatments based on individual response predictions. In 2021, Dr. Stappenbeck and his team published groundbreaking research in Inflammatory Bowel Diseases showing that epithelial cell biomarkers could predict patient response to biological therapies for Crohn’s disease. Mobius Care is also focused on developing new markers and therapeutics aimed at promoting mucosal healing—an often overlooked but essential aspect of IBD treatment.
