Life Sciene's Inventor of the Month
Marc Giroux, CEO of the Bothell, Washington-based company Kurve
Technology, has combined personal necessity and ingenuity to
create a device that has the potential to change the way drugs are
delivered to and absorbed by the body.
Giroux became interested in nasal drug delivery systems out of
dire necessity. Beginning at age 12, he suffered from chronic rhinitis
and sinusitis: conditions that affected his quality of life in a
number of significant ways. For years, he was forced to sleep upright.
He lost his sense of smell when he was a teenager, and had five
sinus surgeries prior to the age of 35. For most of his adult life,
his physicians' therapy of choice was the administration of a variety
of drugs and drug combinations using existing nasal delivery systems.
After years of this approach, Giroux began intently questioning
his doctors about why his condition wasn't improving. He was told
that the problem wasn't with the drugs themselves, but rather with
their delivery mechanism. The majority of drugs administered by
nasal devices then in use reach only the anterior portion of the
nasal cavity, where most of the medication drains to the back of
the throat and is swallowed. With those mechanisms, only a small
fraction of the drug reaches areas of the nasal cavity where it
can be readily absorbed. The realization that he wasn't getting
better as a result of an inadequate delivery system, rather than
pharmaceutically ineffective drugs, led Giroux to take matters into
his own hands.
Determined to improve his condition, Giroux began to modify a nebulizer:
a device that transforms liquids into aerosols, and is most commonly
used to deliver drugs to the lungs. His goal was to deliver aerosolized
medications to the entire nasal cavity.
Specifically, it was important for the aerosolized medications
to reach the paranasal sinuses, because the drugs he was using were
absorbed topically and therefore required direct contact with the
affected areas. After several failures in converting a nebulizer
into a nasal drug delivery system, he had a breakthrough in his
design that enabled the nebulizer to deliver a drug throughout the
nasal cavity, including the heretofore-inaccessible paranasal sinuses.
Using his invention, Giroux has successfully treated his own sinusitis
on a daily basis for the past two years-surely a testament to the
success of his product design. The result of Giroux's tenacious
efforts was the creation of a new nasal drug delivery system, called
ViaNase™, which uses Kurve's proprietary Controlled Particle
Dispersion Technology. The ViaNase™ unit is about the size
of a deck of cards, and it consistently delivers aerosolized liquid
throughout the nasal cavity and into the paranasal sinuses. In addition
to being odorless, tasteless and painless, the mechanism may reduce
the amount of drug required for effective treatment.
While Giroux's personal experience and pre-clinical trials at Oregon
Health Sciences University (OHSU) suggest ViaNase™ will
work with most existing nasally delivered drugs, it is also likely
to be useful for drugs targeted at systemic conditions such as migraine
headaches and cardiovascular disease. Research is presently underway
to adapt the technology to work with solutions with varying viscosities
and to optimize droplet sizes so it can be used with other types
of drugs.
The addition of ViaNase™ to the list of drug delivery devices
will ultimately give medical practitioners and patients more treatment
choices. Industry analysts predict the nasal drug delivery market
will grow by 15 percent per year, to $9 billion by 2008. As a result
of the hard work by Giroux and Kurve Technology, Kurve was recently
awarded $800,000 in early-stage funding and has formed a partnership
with the Italian aerosol device company Medel.
DWT is pleased to recognize Marc Giroux as Inventor of the Month,
and looks forward to further developments in Kurve Technology's
ViaNase™ system-for the benefit of people who suffer from simple
seasonal allergies as well as those with serious diseases requiring
more effective drug delivery systems.
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