A Medical Device Daily

Taris Biomedical (Lexington, Massachusetts), a specialty pharmaceutical company specializing in the field of drug-device convergence for targeted therapies, launched this week and reported it has secured $15 million in Series A financing.

Venture capital firms Flagship Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Polaris Venture Partners co-led the investment in TARIS, which was founded by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge) – Michael Cima, PhD, and Robert Langer, PhD along with Christine Bunt, chief operating officer and former executive with CombinatoRx, Merck & Co and Hoffmann La-Roche.

According to the company, the core platform technology, which was developed by MIT, enables local sustained delivery of drugs directly to the target tissue through drug-device convergence. Taris is focusing its development efforts in disease areas with high unmet need in which current therapies or systemic treatments have failed.

Bladder diseases, which are difficult to treat with systemic therapies, affect 50 million people in the U.S. alone. These diseases include interstitial cystitis (IC)/painful bladder syndrome (PBS), bladder cancer, overactive bladder, urinary tract infections and chronic pelvic pain syndrome.

Taris has developed a lidocaine-releasing intravesical system (LiRIS) that supplies a sustained release of lidocaine directly into the bladder. Lidocaine has been shown in scientific literature and clinical practice, to decrease symptoms associated with bladder diseases, such as bladder pain and urgency when instilled directly into the bladder, the company said said.

IC/PBS, a bladder disease associated with significant pain and disability, as well as urinary urgency and/or frequency, will be the initial therapeutic area of focus for Taris. People with severe cases of IC/PBS may urinate 25 to 60 times a day, including frequent nighttime urination, also called nocturnia, the company noted.

Taris said IC/PBS can "dramatically impact" quality of life, including loss of work and reduced sexual intimacy. IC/PBS is associated with suicidal rates five-to-seven times the national average. New therapeutic options for IC/PBS are desperately needed, the company said. More than 4 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from IC/PBS, for which only two medications are approved, both associated with "significant" efficacy limitations, according to Taris.

"Current approaches to the treatment of bladder diseases such as IC/PBS are often ineffective, painful and cumbersome to the patient. This is an important unmet medical need for Taris to address," Cima said.

"With deep domain expertise in therapeutics and drug-delivery, we are pleased to have the support of Flagship, Flybridge and Polaris as investors in the company," Bunt said. "The proceeds from this financing will support the ongoing development of our first product into marketable applications for bladder diseases. We are preparing to initiate clinical development with the LiRIS system this fall with the goal of entering Phase II clinical studies in 2010."

Taris also reported an expansion of its current board of directors by welcoming Dennis Ausiello, the Jackson Professor of Clinical Medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (both Boston) and Ernest Mario, PhD, CEO/chairman of Capnia (Palo Alto, California).

In conjunction with the funding, Ed Kania, managing partner and chairman of Flagship, Michael Greeley, general partner at Flybridge, and Kevin Bitterman, principal at Polaris have joined the Taris board of directors along with Cima, Langer, and Bunt.