OLFAX Medical is a company that is working to improve patients' health through better nasal drug delivery.
Right place. Right time. Right dose.
- Revolutionize nasal drug delivery. The world of nasal drug delivery has been plagued by inefficient technology that has been essentially unchanged for the past 40 years. Pharmaceutical companies are forced to use the same metered dose nasal spray pumps for expensive, potentially life-saving drugs as they do for simple, over the counter treatments. Not only is this method outdated, but it also limits the absorption capabilities of nasal medications. Olfax Medical’s patent-pending Automizer device brings modern autoinjector technology to atomized nasal drug delivery.
- Use the whole nose. One of the biggest downsides of traditional nasal sprays is that most of the medication gets trapped in the front of the nasal cavity, the nasal valve. This region does not absorb medication as well as the areas of the nose higher and further back. The area of the nose called the nasal turbinates have a different type of cell lining the cavity, as well as the majority of the blood vessels and nerves of the nose. Olfax Medical’s Automizer technology uses a special shape, size, material, and spray volume to effectively bypass the nasal valve and maximize medication absorption.
- Nose to brain. While much of nasal drug administration has focused on systemic drugs that are absorbed into the bloodstream through the extensive blood vessel network of the nasal turbinates, there has been increasing research in recent years exploring the use of the nerve networks of the turbinates, the olfactory and trigeminal nerves, to absorb neurologically active medications directly from the nose to the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier. This “nose to brain” concept has great potential to improve the treatment options for neurological diseases, but current nasal delivery devices lack the ability to deliver a majority of the spray plume to the proper areas of the nose needed for this to occur. The Automizer overcomes this limitation and will be an excellent option for companies developing nose to brain drugs.
- Double-dose capacity. The Automizer’s patent-pending double-dose design allows for either a larger total dose delivered to both nostrils, or a second dose for later use.
- Higher volume per dose. Studies have shown that the ideal volume of spray for nasal drug absorption is between 0.25 and 0.3mL, but no current nasal device is capable of delivering more than 0.1ml per spray. The Automizer can be configured to deliver different doses, up to 0.3ml per nostril, with two doses per device. That means that a single disposable device can deliver a volume of 0.6mL, evenly distributed over both sides of the nasal cavity -- six times more than any currently available device.