Teeccino Is Ready for Explosive Growth
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Kurve Therapeutics is working on a noninvasive nose-to-brain device that can help treat Alzheimer’s, but its road to FDA approval is long.
My grandfather was a funny and caring man. I used to love being around him — until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. As time went by, he could not recognize me anymore. I wish something, or someone, could have stopped the disease, but nothing did. He died when I was 11 years old. I still remember that day as one of the worst of my life.
I’m not the only person to suffer from the impact of Alzheimer’s. When his father was diagnosed, Kurve Therapeutics founder and CEO Marc Giroux got clever. He repurposed the device he built to treat his own sinusitis into a device that sent insulin into the brain and stopped the progression of his father’s Alzheimer’s. After six years on the device, Grioux’s father was considered asymptomatic. Today, it can bring hope to patients and their families.
His device, based on Kurve Therapeutics’ own patented Controlled Particle Dispersion (CPD) intranasal drug delivery technology, can easily send insulin and other drugs into the brain through the nose. There’s never been an effective way to deliver drugs from the nose to the brain. Nor has the FDA ever approved such a delivery method. Traditional nasal sprays have proven unable to pass through the blood-brain barrier (the blood vessels around the brain that prevent most molecules, including drugs, from reaching it). The majority of the medication never leaves the nasal cavity, sinuses, or gastrointestinal tract. Only a tiny bit reaches the brain.
Kurve Therapeutics’ technology solves this problem. Preliminary studies have shown that it can bypass the difficult-to-penetrate blood-brain barrier and deliver up to 30 times more medication directly to the brain than infusions.
Based on Kurve Therapeutics’ phase 2 trial results, sending insulin into the brain twice a day with the device can prevent the symptoms of Alzheimer’s from progressing. The device also has the potential to stop and possibly heal several other diseases, such as dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). For example, the company has diminished the size of a frontal lobe brain tumor by 50% by injecting stem cells through the brain with its device. It should be noted that the evidence is preliminary and would need to be proved through FDA-approved testing.
Until now, no company has been able to develop an FDA-approved treatment that stops Alzheimer’s in its tracks. If approved by the FDA, Kurve Therapeutics’ CPD device would be the first and rightly considered a groundbreaking leap forward.
Kurve Therapeutics is raising to start a phase 3 trial with 300 Alzheimer patients. This is a rare opportunity for crowdfunding investors. Most successful drug companies are acquired or go public after passing their phase 2 trials. But Kurve Therapeutics is a medical device company, not a drug company. It needs to not only win FDA approval but also prove it can go to market and become an attractive acquisition for bigger medical firms. Kurve Therapeutics’ advanced stage in the FDA approval process explains its pricey $291.7 million valuation.
However, the company will need to reach far more than a $1 billion valuation for investors to get a decent return. Kurve Therapeutics’ ability to do so depends on successful trial 3 results.
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