Unmet Medical Need: The top 5 drugs sold are delivered by injection, 3 of them are biologics. Due to the revolution of emerged fields like immuno-oncology, more and more of these high revenue drugs are biologics. Biologic drugs present a big promise, but they are met with a big problem: They are usually macromolecules, a fact that makes their formulations highly viscous. This makes the standard of care injection devices incompetent from a healthcare perspective: Devices require long injection times and larger gauge needles. The net result for patients is pain and discomfort and therefore reduced acceptance and compliance for treatments.

Envisioned Healthcare Product: This team has developed a high performance actuating material that could drive formulations 7 times more viscous than any other technology currently available on the market. The promise this technology provides is the possible reduction of the number of injections by half while minimizing device failure rate due to the robustness of the actuating material at the core of the device. The net impact for patients will be a significant reduction of pain and discomfort of self-administration of biologics, and for providers - a decrease in healthcare costs. 

Stage of Development:  Proof of Concept

Collaborative Research Team: Ozgur Sahin, PhD, Richard Carvajal, MD and Eran Schenker 

Funding Cycle: 2018-2019