Date: Oct 15, 2015 Source: SBIR.gov (
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Macular Degeneration is the leading cause of blindness and vision loss in people over 50 --and with life expectancies well into the 80s, it is estimated that 1 and 3 elderly individuals will have to deal with this degenerative disease. The remedy? Monthly injections (via needle) into the back of the eye, where the disease lives. Not only does this method come with the possibility of an infection, but the costs of this treatment -- upwards of thousands per injection -- renders it impossible to achieve in third world nations.
Enter Charlesson LLC, which thanks to some SBIR grants from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and supplemental state funding, has developed a patented means to deliver therapeutics right to the retina -- without the use of invasive needles.
"One inherent problem with injections is that if a variety of drugs are needed, you can't use 8 needles at once," explains Charlesson CEO Dr. Rafal Farjo. "By making these emulsions, you can deliver a customized treatment for each individual within an eye drop, and successfully reach the back of the eye."
The technology is called Microemulsion Drug Ocular Penetration System (MiDROPS™) and it allows the topical delivery of compounds into the eye in a non-invasive manner. Charlesson spun off EyeCRO -- short for Eye Contract Research Organization -- in order to dedicate the necessary personnel and research to this coveted medical breakthrough. It is EyeCRO's goal to be able to formulate eye drops for a variety of applications in therapeutics. In the future, EyeCRO would like to tackle diabetic retinopathy, diabetic eye diseases, inherited and genetic diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, and eventually Glaucoma. Farjo credits the SBIR program with helping the company to take the necessary steps needed to venture out into the new and unknown spinoff territory.
"When we first started getting our grants from HHS, we had to identify industry partners, and we realized two things," says Farjo. "The quality of the science wasn't up to par with what we had in our own research lab since the research wasn't well optimized, and many studies were cost prohibitive. We thought -- we can do this better ourselves and offer a higher standard of science, while at a lower cost to enable more academic and startup groups the ability to conduct preclinical studies. So that was the start of EyeCRO. And we are in the process of spinning off another organization as well."
