Overview
We are a pharmaceutical company developing therapeutics utilizing our proprietary long-term drug delivery platform, ProNeura®, for the treatment of select chronic diseases for which steady state delivery of a drug has the potential to provide an efficacy and/or safety benefit. ProNeura consists of a small, solid implant made from a mixture of ethylene-vinyl acetate, or EVA, and a drug substance. The resulting product is a solid matrix that is designed to be administered subdermally in a brief, outpatient procedure and is removed in a similar manner at the end of the treatment period.
Our first product based on our ProNeura technology was Probuphine® (buprenorphine implant), which is approved in the United States, Canada and the European Union, or EU, for the maintenance treatment of opioid use disorder in clinically stable patients taking 8 mg or less a day of oral buprenorphine. While Probuphine continues to be commercialized in Canada and in the EU (as Sixmo™) by other companies that have either licensed or acquired the rights from Titan, we discontinued commercialization of the product in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2020 to allow us to focus our limited resources on product development programs.
In December 2021, we announced our intention to work with our financial advisor to explore strategic alternatives to enhance stockholder value, potentially including an acquisition, merger, reverse merger, other business combination, sales of assets, licensing or other transaction. In June 2022, we implemented a plan to reduce expenses and conserve capital that included a company-wide reduction in salaries and a scale back of certain operating expenses to enable us to maintain sufficient resources as we pursued potential strategic alternatives. In July 2022, David Lazar and Activist Investing LLC (collectively, “Activist”) acquired an approximately 25% ownership interest in Titan and filed a proxy statement for the purpose of nominating six additional directors to our board of directors (the “Board”) at a special meeting of stockholders to be held on August 15, 2022 (the “Special Meeting”). We expect that the exploration and evaluation of possible strategic alternatives by the Board will continue following the Special Meeting.
ProNeura Continuous Drug Delivery Platform
Our ProNeura continuous drug delivery system consists of a small, solid rod-shaped implant made from a mixture of EVA and a given drug substance. The resulting product is a solid matrix that is placed subdermally, normally in the inside part of the upper arm in a brief procedure using a local anesthetic and is removed in a similar manner at the end of the treatment period. The drug substance is released continuously through the process of dissolution-controlled diffusion. This results in a continuous, steady rate of release generally similar to intravenous administration. We believe that such long-term, near linear release characteristics are desirable as they avoid the fluctuating peak and trough drug levels seen with oral dosing that often poses treatment problems in a range of diseases.
The ProNeura platform was developed to address the need for a simple, practical method to achieve continuous long-term drug delivery, and, depending on the characteristics of the compound to be delivered, can potentially provide treatment on an outpatient basis over extended periods of up to 12 months. We believe that the benefits of this technology have been demonstrated by the clinical results seen to date with Probuphine, and, in addition, that the development and regulatory process have been affirmed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, the European Medicines Agency, or EMA, and Health Canada approvals of this product. We have further demonstrated the feasibility of the ProNeura platform with small molecules, hormones, and bio-active peptides. The delivery system works with both hydrophobic and hydrophilic molecules. We have also shown the flexibility of the platform by experimenting with the release characteristics of the EVA implants, layering the implants with varying concentrations of drug, and generating implants of different sizes and porosity to achieve a desired delivery profile.
Development Programs
We currently have the following development programs for which development activities have been substantially curtailed while we are exploring several financing and strategic alternatives.
●TP-2021 - A subdermal ProNeura implant containing TP-2021, our kappa opioid agonist peptide, for the potential delivery of therapeutic concentrations of TP-2021 in human subjects with pruritus for up to six months or longer following a single in-office procedure. We will need to conduct Investigational New Drug, or IND, enabling non-clinical safety and pharmacology studies in preparation for regulatory approval to enter human clinical studies.
●MUSC - Pursuant to a research and option license agreement with the Medical University of South Carolina Foundation for Research Development, we have also synthesized a limited number of new peptides designed, like TP-2021, to bind with high selectivity to peripheral kappa opioid receptors.