In the fall of 2025, McMaster University scientist Jon Stokes discovered enterololin, a potent new antibiotic with the potential to treat inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), like Crohn’s. Now, with more than $2 million in fresh funding from the Weston Family Foundation, the new drug candidate is on the fast-track toward achieving its potential, and could advance to clinical trials in just three years.
Enterololin’s vast clinical promise is rooted in how it works: it doesn’t just kill dangerous gut bacteria, but surgically targets them, leaving the body’s beneficial microbes completely unscathed.
This extreme precision stands in stark contrast to the predominantly broad-spectrum antibiotics that currently line pharmacy shelves around the world, which take out good and neutral microbes along with the ones that cause infection.
Stokes says that while this trade-off is often considered worthwhile for patients and practitioners staring down serious bacterial infections, it comes with significant risk — especially for those living with IBD.
“These conditions are exacerbated by gut dysbiosis — or the disruption of the microbial communities that live within us,” explains Stokes, an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences at McMaster and a member of the Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research. “These disruptions can create vacancies that can be filled by other, more dangerous bacteria, like adherent-invasive E. coli, which itself can also exacerbate IBD.”
But enterololin’s ability to prevent dysbiosis, coupled with the fact that it’s highly effective against the strains of E. coli implicated in IBDs, like Crohn’s, makes the molecule a double-threat as a treatment candidate for these conditions, and a lifeline for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians currently living with them.
“Canada has one of the highest prevalence rates of IBD in the world, so while this is a pressing problem globally, enterololin is particularly important for Canadians,” Stokes says.
Indeed, in the weeks after enterololin’s discovery was announced, Stokes says his inbox “blew up.” Messages poured in from Canadian Crohn’s patients and the advocacy groups that support them: I’m so excited about this. Please help. My daughter is sick. Nothing is working. I’ve been sick for years. How do I sign up? I’m willing to try it right now. I’m desperate.
“We’re talking hundreds of different messages — and I’m still getting one or two a week, even now,” Stokes says. “Our discovery gave all of these people a legitimate sense of hope, but I had to let them down — I had to tell them, ‘this is preclinical work. It’s nowhere near ready for people yet.’”
With the new funding from the Weston Family Foundation, though, Stokes is walking that back, confident now that he can make good on the hope he incited this past fall.
“This renewed support from the Weston Family Foundation is enabling the next stage of critical preclinical studies, our regulatory preparation, and some early-phase clinical trial design,” says Stokes, who is also a faculty member at the Marnix E. Heersink School of Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and an executive member of NexusHealth. “If all goes well, enterololin will be ready for human trials in three to four years.”
The new funding is part of the Weston Family Foundation’s Transformational Research Program, which funds high-risk, high-reward translational research projects that stand to benefit the lives of Canadians.
“Investing in microbiome research today is crucial for turning scientific breakthroughs into real-world solutions,” says Garfield Mitchell, Chair of the Weston Family Foundation. “Accelerating the development of microbiome‑based interventions ensures we seize the opportunity to transform the lives of Canadians living with IBD.”
Stokes acknowledges that jumping from petri dishes to people is a significant milestone — but one his group is well prepared to meet.
In recent years, his lab has become a preclinical powerhouse, using artificial intelligence to discover and characterize multiple molecules with strong clinical potential. And, having now advanced many of them through rigorous preclinical validation, his group is eager to push the best ones — enterololin among them — forward.
“Preclinical research is critical to advancing science and discovery, but I want to do more than cure mice in the lab,” Stokes says. “I want to help people who need help — especially after hearing from so many of them directly.”
To ensure enterololin is the first molecule from his lab to break through to humans, Stokes is working with collaborators from across Canada to test its safety in organoids, which are miniaturized versions of human organs grown in the lab using human cells.
He is also putting his own money where his mouth is. In addition to the $2 million from the Weston Family Foundation, his spinout company, Stoked Bio, is committing an extra $1.5 million to help prepare the new antibiotic for clinical development.
It’s a significant bet on a molecule that, to date, has only been tested in the controlled confines of a university laboratory, but Stokes says that he believes in its potential, and that the combined funding will allow his team to steamroll the final hurdles standing between the lab and the clinic.
“The company is augmenting the opportunity created here by the Weston Family Foundation,” he says. “It’s their generous support that’s giving us the chance to turn an exciting preclinical discovery into an actual medicine — all I’m doing is seizing it.”
This article was originally published by McMaster University on April 14, 2026. Read the full article here.
