RALEIGH, NC—Respirics Inc. has closed a $2.5 million first round from two angel investor groups, Catalysta Ventures and Research Triangle Ventures and several new angel investors.

The financing will be used to accelerate a number of internal drug development programs involving the company’s Acu-Breathe dry powder inhaler platform. Earlier this month the company said it would divest its assets in MD Turbo, currently its only U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved device, to focus solely on its Acu-Breathe inhaler.

Respirics President and CEO Gilbert S. Mott Jr. says the eight-employee company founded in 2001 may do some hiring later this year, but is happy in its current 3,000-square-foot offices.

Respirics sees a lot of upside in its Acu-Breathe product. Mott tells TechJournal South, “We’ve got a better mousetrap with plenty of intellectual property.” The company has more than 50 patents on its two product platforms.

Market advantages
In an earlier statement regarding the company’s decision to sell MD Turbo, Mott said, “The product has been on the market for a year, and we believe it deserves to be in the hands of a company with resources to vigorously promote it. Consequently, we’ve decided to sell MD Turbo so the product can receive the attention it merits.”

The Acu-Breathe device, the company says, has distinct advantages over others currently available. Mott explains that the Respirics inhaler individually packages each dose in a disposable device. The dose is not opened until used, unlike inhalers, which are loaded with multiple doses all at once.

The breath-triggered Respirics device does not release the dose until the patient exerts the correct breath-flow rate. “You have to inhale hard enough to get it to release,” says Mott. “That gets a good percentage of the drug down there.”

Most pressurized metered dose inhalers are typically inefficient, he says, because patients get as little as 10 percent of the drug. That’s all right if the drug has a wide therapeutic range, but many newer drugs are very expensive to make and efficient delivery is important.

Summer IND planned
One reason the company’s inhaler offers such promise, says Mott, is that many respiratory drugs are off-patent and only protected by current delivery options. Providing a new, more effective delivery option can renew a drug’s profitability.

Also, Mott points out, many other drugs can be inhaled, from painkillers such as morphine to antibiotics. The Acu-Breathe inhaler may be particularly useful in delivering some of the more toxic antibiotics in less toxic doses that remain effective because they are delivered directly to the lungs.

“If you treat a lung infection topically, you can effectively treat it with a smaller dose than you would need to treat it systemically,” Mott says.

Respirics expects to file an IND (investigational new drug application) with the FDA this summer and start trials of using Acu-Breathe to deliver a well known respiratory product for the management of asthma and COPD.

Mott and co-founders Dr. David Gardner and Robert Casper all worked for GlaxoSmithKline in the 1980s and 1990s.

For more see: www.respirics.com

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