Interstitial cystitis (IC) is a chronic, severely debilitating disease of the urinary bladder. It can be described as a chronic inflammatory condition of the bladder wall, characterized by urinary frequency and urgency, and severe suprapubic and/or pelvic pain. Presently, there is limited medical therapy for IC and new and effective treatment is a major unmet medical need. Lipella Pharmaceuticals Inc. intends to be the leading company specializing in the use of intravesical liposome technology to treat IC. We have developed a method of formulating highly specific liposomes for intravesical instillation. The technology is licensed from inventions and research by Drs. Leaf Huang and Michael Chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh. Based on their research that a liposome itself can provides a soothing effect to an irritated bladder (RO1 DK068556;Fraser et al. 2003), Lipella Pharmaceuticals expects that intravesical liposome formulations can present an improved activity in patients with IC. Prior to submitting this phase-II proposal, phase-I funding was used primarily to explore preclinical safety considerations of LP-08, a novel intravesical liposome therapy for IC, in a rat model. This phase-II proposal includes further safety studies, specifically measuring consequences of expected repeat dosing, as well as developing manufacturing scale-up procedures necessary for subsequent human testing. The effort proposed here would, in part, contribute to pre-clinical data collection prior to filing an FDA Investigational New Drug (IND) application, a regulatory requirement prior to administering LPA-08 in humans.
We propose key preclinical experiments in an animal model to validate follow-on investment for clinical development of a novel treatment for painful bladder syndrome, an incurable chronic illness involving pain, urinary urgency, loss of sleep, depression and anxiety in approximately 500,000 women domestically.
