A company developing a system designed to reduce the amount of topical eye medication necessary to achieve therapeutic benefit while improving accuracy plans to advance the technology’s development with proceeds from a financing round that it just closed.
Menlo Park, California-based Kedalion Therapeutics said Monday that it had raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by Lagunita Biosciences. It plans to use the money for the development of its AcuStream technology platform through to pilot-scale Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) production and advance its clinical programs, according to a press release Monday. AcuStream is designed to deliver topical drugs to the eye, reducing necessary dosage by 80 percent compared with other methods while enabling similar levels of efficacy, according to the company.
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According to medical research and media reports cited by the company, current methods for administering topical eye medications result in too much medicine being administered, most patients dosing improperly, contamination of administration bottles and poor compliance.
Indeed, studies have pointed to problems with eye drug delivery for a long time. One study on advances in eye drug delivery, published in 2010, found that topical ocular drug bioavailability is “notoriously poor” and amounts to 5 percent or less due to multiple barriers to drug entry like drug transport barriers, drainage and clearance from veins in the eye.
Kedalion finished two Phase I trials of its product last August, respectively enrolling 20 and 18 subjects, who were randomized to receive either standard eye drops at 30 microliters or nine microliters using AcuStream. According to data from both studies presented in April this year at the Ophthalmic Innovation Summit, subjects receiving the smaller dose via AcuStream showed a statistically similar pupil dilation effect to those receiving the higher dose of standard eye drops.
In a report last year, Transparency Market Research forecast that the global market for ocular drug delivery market – which the topical segment dominates – would be worth more than $18.1 billion by 2025. While not publicly releasing a dollar figure, another report last year, by Research and Markets, stated that there is a “record” number of companies developing improved ocular delivery systems that provide benefits like ease of administration, accurate dosing and sustained release.
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