Startup MHB Labs announced the receipt of $1.1 million in seed financing from Cambridge, MA-based Romulus Capital and other angel investors in support of its drug delivery technology for convenient administration of a commercially available but little-used medication that could have applications in the men's health space.
MHB Labs is a spinoff of Men's Health Boston, a men's health clinic for problems like male infertility.
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| MHB Labs CEO Dr. Ravi Kacker |
"We have known for years that this drug had significant potential outside of its traditional applications," said CEO Dr. Ravi Kacker in a statement. "However, it is very impractical and inconvenient to use. We have found a way to make administration cheaper and more convenient, opening up new clinical applications and the potential to become the market leader in a major pharmaceutical class."
MHB Labs is looking for a pharma licensing partner for its product, dubbed AndroSphere. The candidate's delivery system will be capable of injecting a large protein that lasts many months, Kacker told Xconomy.
"This is fertile ground for new products," Kacker said in the article. "There are only a few delivery technologies, scattered around the world, and they're not really plugged into clinical needs outside of cancer and hematology."
The description of the drug delivery technology being used is vague. But a hint could lie in MHB Labs' advisory relationship with Recon Therapeutics. Recon is the developer of a novel injection system that eliminates the need for patients to prepare freeze-dried, or lyophilized, biologics prior to injection. The company's LyoKit System is supposed to replace the complicated reconstitution process with a one-button push of the specialized syringe's plunger.
Currently, lyophilized biologics come in the form of powdered drug and must be manually mixed with water by patients using vials, in the case of at-home use.
Romulus' portfolio companies are mostly in the tech space, including a couple in the health IT arena such as Ginger.io and Cohealo. But Allurion Technologies is therapeutically focused. It is developing a medical device for weight loss that can be delivered and removed without surgery or endoscopy.
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