A paradigm change in the treatment of blinding ocular diseases

ended

Ocular inflammatory diseases – affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide – impose a significant medical and economic burden on society and can lead to blindness. Today, corticosteroids are the most common method used to treat ocular non-infectious inflammation of any kind. Rather than treating the disease itself, however, steroids merely relieve its symptoms, and long-term use can result in devastating consequences. Our bio-inspired drug candidate is a non-steroid. It approaches inflammatory diseases from within the immune system and was developed to ‘re-engineer’ the immune system. Based on excellent preclinical results, we believe that this approach will have the capability to disrupt the immune mechanism that causes the disease in order to provide patients with a safe and long-lasting therapeutic effect, with the goal of saving them from blindness. Our platform technology has the potential to effectively treat a broad array of autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and to become a first in class, market approved molecule for local treatment of inflammatory ocular diseases. Our first target indication is uveitic glaucoma – a devastating orphan disease requiring urgent treatment and carrying high risk of blindness. Selecting an orphan indication as a market penetration strategy will grant us extended market exclusivity, tax reliefs and shorter time to market. In the project, we will perform a Phase I/IIa clinical trial. We will exploit the trial results to secure financing for further clinical development towards commercialization. The global ocular inflammation treatment market is expected to exceed more than US$ 500 Billion by 2024. As our first target indication has a significant unmet need with no approved treatment, we expect to gain 25% of market shares 5 years post launch, which would correspond to >€700 M in revenue for Tarsius in 2028 for uveitic glaucoma only. Profits will be reinvested to develop our product pipeline and expand our company.