The White House has announced a $1.1B initiative to combat prescription opioid drug abuse. In President Obama's most recent State of the Union Address, he identified prescription drug abuse as one of his top priorities. Currently, 2.1 million Americans suffer from opioid-based dependence or abuse. One company has been in the news with its proprietary technology that makes it difficult to abuse prescription drugs, keeping them from being crushed or turned into more easily abusable powder.
Egalet (EGLT) is a small cap ($195M) specialty pharmaceutical company that was founded in 1995. It is the first company to develop an erosion-based pill that allows for the controlled release of drugs and also deters abuse. The company went public in 2014 and was added to the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index in December.
Egalet Aims to Deter Prescription Drug Abuse
Egalet has created a proprietary technology called Guardian. Guardian technology has made pills that are virtuallyy indestructible, effectively making prescription painkiller drugs more difficult to abuse. The company currently sells two products, Oxaydo and Sprix Nasal Spray. Oxaydo is the immediate-release oxycodone product formulated to deter abuse via snorting, for managing acute and chronic pain where an opioid is appropriate while formulated to deter abuse via snorting. Sprix Nasal Spray, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), is indicated in adult patients for the short-term (up to five days) management of moderate to moderately severe pain that requires analgesia at the opioid level.
Egalet is developing two late-stage products using Egalet's proprietary Guardian Technology. The lead program, Egalet-001, is an abuse-deterrent, extended-release, oral morphine formulation, and Egalet-002 is an abuse-deterrent, extended-release, oral oxycodone formulation.
The Guardian Technology creates oral pills with physical and chemical properties that deters the most common and rigorous abuse of particular drugs. The technology also offers an erosion process that gradually releases the drugs' active ingredients. This technology can be applied broadly across wide variety of pharmaceutical products, and can be used to develop a combination of products that include multiple active ingredients with different release profiles.
