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INNOVATION
Ocularly photoactivatable tablets and capsules for the treatment of retinopathies
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Market Maturity: Exploring
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Market Creation Potential
This innovation was assessed by the JRC’s Market Creation Potential indicator framework as addressing the needs of existing markets and existing customers. Learn more
Women-led innovation
A woman had a leadership role in developing this innovation in at least one of the Key Innovator organisations listed below.
Go to Market needs
Needs that, if addressed, can increase the chances this innovation gets to (or closer to) the market incude:
  • Prepare for Market entry
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  • Scale-up market opportunities
Location of Key Innovators developing this innovation
Key Innovators
UN Sustainable Development Goals(SDG)
This innovation contributes to the following SDG(s)
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOAL 3
Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

The UN explains: "Significant strides have been made in increasing life expectancy and reducing some of the common killers responsible for child and maternal mortality.

Major progress has also been made on increasing access to clean water and sanitation, reducing malaria, tuberculosis, polio and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

However, many more efforts are needed to control a wide range of diseases and address many different persistent and emerging health issues."

The EU-funded Research Project
This innovation was developed under the Horizon Europe project NeoVasculoStop with an end date of 28/02/2026
  • Read more about this project on CORDIS
Description of Project NeoVasculoStop
Retinopathies constitute an extreme societal and socioeconomic burden that is expected to increase with an aging population and the increased prevalence of diabetes. These diseases, including age-related macular degeneration and proliferative diabetic retinopathy share neovascularization as a common etiology involving the pathological growth of retinal capillaries leading to blindness if left untreated. Current treatment modalities involve specialized injections into the eye that require not only outpatient visits to specialized treatment centers but are also associated with significant adverse effects. Orally bioavailable medications could revolutionize the treatment of retinopathies, by reducing adverse effects, sustaining vision, lowering the direct and indirect financial burden associated with these diseases, and increasing access to healthcare. Inspired by this idea, we have developed an approach that can be exploited to target essentially any therapeutic molecule to the eye. Our novel strategy of drug targeting will not only enrich the modified molecules in retinal tissue but will also reduce the therapeutic oral dose compared to existing anti-angiogenic therapy in cancer thereby increasing the safety of the treatment. This is achieved by absorbing a minute amount of the chemically and biologically stable molecules resulting in an extremely low plasma concentration and relying on a biological mechanism in the eye to activate the molecules to tether them to retinal target receptors and thereby extracting them from the blood. In the present application, we propose to demonstrate proof-of-concept of this strategy by modifying inhibitors of the vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR). VEGFR is an endothelial receptor tyrosine kinase that is a key mediator of angiogenesis and an established drug target for the treatment of retinopathies. Our approach will elicit a paradigm shift in how we design future drug delivery strategies to the retina.

Innnovation Radar's analysis of this innovation is based on data collected on 05/05/2023.
The unique id of this innovation in the European Commission's IT systems is: 112402