No­var­tis backs eye drop mak­er in $20M round, meds to fill gap left by Eylea/Lu­cen­tis

Eye-ob­sessed No­var­tis, in a syn­di­cate with oth­er in­vestors, has backed a $20 mil­lion round for Swiss biotech Oculis. The hope is to see the com­pa­ny’s ex­per­i­men­tal eye drops even­tu­al­ly snag a chunk of the mar­ket that drugs like Eylea and Lu­cen­tis have failed to cap­ture.

The 15-year-old com­pa­ny is work­ing on a top­i­cal ver­sion of the well-known steroid dex­am­etha­sone with the goal of de­liv­er­ing the drug via eye drops. The prod­uct can­di­date, which the com­pa­ny is call­ing OC-118, is be­ing de­vel­oped us­ing Oculis’ nov­el plat­form called “sol­u­bi­liz­ing nanopar­ti­cle” tech­nol­o­gy, or SNP. This tech­nol­o­gy, the com­pa­ny hopes, can boost the drug’s abil­i­ty to reach the front and the back of the eye — some­thing that pre­vi­ous drugs haven’t achieved un­less de­liv­ered via nee­dle to the eye.

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