Licence agreement for nasal spray drug delivery platform

A nasal spray technology that enables the delivery of psychedelic and non-psychedelic drugs to treat mental health disorders will enter development for clinical use, following the signing of a licence agreement between The University of Queensland (UQ) and start-up company InnarisBio, an atai Life Sciences company.

Traditional drug delivery methods can be problematic in the treatment of central nervous system (CNS) disorders due to the blood–brain barrier that restricts the CNS entry of therapeutic agents, thereby decreasing drug efficacy. An alternative solution is direct nose-to-brain delivery, which has the potential to be a painless and non-invasive administration route and may offer additional advantages such as increased patient compliance, lower dose requirements than oral administration, rapid onset of action and minimised systemic exposure, which may reduce the risk of peripheral toxicity.

Dr Harendra Parekh and his team at UQ developed a solution-to-gel intranasal drug delivery technology — a liquid solution containing the therapeutic compound that converts to a gel upon contact with the inside membrane of the nose. Florian Brand, CEO and co-founder of atai Life Sciences, said the company plans to explore the use of the sol-gel technology for a variety of compounds in its development pipeline.

“The team led by Dr Parekh at UQ has worked hard to develop a technology that may mitigate many of the drawbacks typically associated with traditional drug delivery to the central nervous system, which has such a large unmet need,” Brand said.

“This novel technology has the potential to be superior to other intranasal drug delivery methods available by improving absolute uptake and duration of uptake through muco-adhesion in the nose, reducing dose administered and dosing frequency.”

UQ commercialisation company UniQuest negotiated the licence agreement, which includes a patent application. Under the terms of the deal, UniQuest will receive equity in InnarisBio, along with the potential to receive future development and commercial milestone payments and a royalty on sales.

InnarisBio will collaborate with UniQuest, Dr Parekh and the research team to formulate and develop bespoke sol-gel formulations for several psychedelic and non-psychedelic compounds nominated by InnarisBio.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/olly

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