Richard Lowenthal, Chief Executive Officer of ARS:
Thank you Laura for that kind introduction. My name is Richard Lowenthal, CEO and Founder of ARS Pharmaceuticals. As outlined on this Slide, we wanted to first remind everyone that neffy is an investigational product and it is not yet approved by the US Food and Drug Administration or the European Medical Agency. The trade name, neffy, has tentative approval from the US FDA, but has not received final approval.
It’s a great pleasure for me to introduce you to ARS Pharmaceuticals and neffy, our needle-free epinephrine nasal spray. Our goal for neffy is to achieve what has not been possible before, which is to deliver epinephrine with comparable pharmacokinetics to an intramuscular injection but with a nasal spray that is easy to use and eliminates the fear of injecting with a needle. Once approved, we believe that neffy’s optimal product profile has the potential to transform the treatment of Type I allergic reactions.
We founded ARS in 2015 with a goal of solving many of the issues patients and caregivers expressed about their current epinephrine injection devices. From day one, our team was focused on taking this well-known, life-saving medication for severe allergies, and making administration needle-free, easy to use and a safer alternative to needle injectors, so that patients and caregivers would have less hesitation to dose immediately after symptoms of an allergic reaction are detected.
At that time, our co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Tanimoto and I, along with many on our extended team, were working on the approval of Narcan nasal spray and Valtoco nasal spray, which are now FDA-approved products for the emergency treatment of opioid overdose and acute repetitive seizures.
We were also working with Aegis, a company developing an excipient known as Intravail, or dodecyl maltoside. While epinephrine is not normally absorbed in the nose, we licensed Intravail’s remarkable properties to facilitate penetration through mucosal membranes and achieved injection-like absorption with neffy. We use the same single-dose nasal sprayer device that has proven to be easy-to-use and highly reliable for Narcan and Valtoco, as well as many other US approved products.
Type I allergic reactions are life-threatening hypersensitivity reactions that can occur within minutes of exposure to an allergen and require immediate treatment with epinephrine – the only known effective medication for this disease.
The only approved community-based products to treat this condition today are epinephrine injection devices, which are effective if carried, used properly and used in time. However, research indicates that patients and caregivers do not always carry injection devices and, if they do, they sometimes use the product incorrectly or significantly delay administration. This reluctance to use needle-based injection devices in a timely manner is often driven by fear – fear of needles, fear of the pain, concerns about safety, and the complexity of the device used.
neffy is needle-free, its small and easy-to-use; it fits into the palm of your hand or pocket, as you can see. Our motto is “no needle, no fear, no wait.” If FDA approved, we hope that patients would carry neffy always and dose immediately at the first signs of an allergic reaction. We believe neffy is ideally positioned to shift this market into an entirely new paradigm with better treatment outcomes.
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