any surgical wounds on the eye. The firm aims to get permission from the FDA to market the product in the U.S. to seal corneal wounds from cataract surgeries. (Sawhney has also started a new company called Augmenix to develop hydrogel for the urology and cancer radiation markets, and he’s serving as that firm’s chief executive.)
The second program at I-Therapeutix is drug delivery. For this use, the startup has invented tiny hydrogel-based plugs that are designed to be implanted into the tear ducts and to release drugs over a certain period of time. Sawhney says that the plan is to develop the implants to deliver existing drugs that are off or nearly off patent, enabling the implants to be sold without need for licenses on the treatments. He says the implants would be more convenient than, say, eye drops and would also improve patients’ adherence to medications because the implants are engineered to release the drugs on their own.
The most apparent competitor to I-Therapeutix is Durham, NC-based HyperBranch Medical Technology (which Sawhney declined to discuss or even acknowledge by name.) HyperBranch says it has developed its own version of hydrogel to seal surgical wounds on the eye, and the product was cleared for sales in Europe in 2007. Medical products heavyweight Becton, Dickinson and Company (NYSE:[[ticker:BDX]]) has an exclusive license to market HyperBranch’s hydrogel eye bandage internationally, according to HyperBranch.
Hydrogel-based eye bandages offer some advantages over products and procedures currently in use, Sawhney says. Eye incisions can be closed with sutures and covered with corneal shields, but the sutures can cause distorted vision and the shields have a tendency to fall out. Then there’s the option of letting the cuts heal without sutures, yet that carries a risk of the wound leaking and exposing the eye to infection, he says.
I-Therapeutix operates with about 23 employees, yet Sawhney says he expects to add roughly 15 to 20 more people over the next year to support the commercialization of I-Zip and the development of the drug-delivery plug.
There is a $300 million annual market for I-Zip in the U.S. and a market of roughly equal size in the rest of the world, according to Sawhney. That’s something to bat your eyes at.
