Vapogenix, a Houston pain medicine startup that’s developing a localized analgesic that penetrates the skin quickly, just raised a tidy sum – $2.1 million, according to a regulatory filing.
The company won’t say which small molecule drug it’s working with, but that it’s a reformulated a non-narcotic pain drug that’s typically used as an inhalant during surgery.
Vapogenix’s rapidly acting topical analgesic has progressed to Phase II trials; its products for wound and inflammatory pain are still at the early stage.
“Our core drug goes through skin in five minutes,” Danguole Altman, Vapogenix’s president and CEO, told Xconomy last year. The story continues:
The base drug of Vapogenix’s drug are the liquid anesthetics—Altman doesn’t want to get into specific drug names for proprietary reasons—which are vaporized by anesthesiologists for use on patients during surgery. Vapogenix’s innovation, she says, is reformulating those drugs into a topical analgesic, either a patch or a liquid, that can be applied directly on to the skin.
“The pure drug is really volatile,” she explains. “The substance will evaporate.”
Altman says it filed an Investigational New Drug, or IND, application with the Food and Drug Administration this week and has raised $3 million from high net-worth individuals in a Series B funding round that’s to close July 31. Vapogenix also has a $2 million grant from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. “I think we’re coming out of the Valley of Death,” she says.
