APIcross goes solo in drug delivery

The Florida-based company made the official launch during the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) conference in San Diego last week. According to APIcross vice president formulation sciences John McCarty, "we got smart"​. "The idea here was to do a fee for service and if an IP was developed then we'd get royalties,"​ McCarty told in-PharmaTechnologist.com at the conference last week. In the past, Azopharma had been developing drug delivery technologies for life cycle management purely as a fee for service for clients but was not reaping the benefits through royalties. The new move to pull out the drug delivery segment as a separate part of Azopharma would now see APIcross receiving royalties from developed products. "If we developed that, we should get something back from the IP. Why should we give it away?"​ McCarty said. The benefit of the move was APIcross had no interest in the intellectual property - that would be kept and controlled by the pharmaceutical company, McCarty said. The new company would be a contract service for: custom technology development; drug release technology; proprietary technology; out-licensed technology; dosage forms; in-house IP assessments; and patent services. The company mainly focussed on drug delivery of oral tablets and capsules, but also looked at transdermal and topical delivery systems, and was not ruling out other delivery methods in the future. In the area of oral drug delivery, APIcross offered delayed, pulsed, targeted, extended release, and combination drug release profiles for tablet or capsule forms, including technologies for increased bioavailability and taste masking. McCarty said the majority of clients looked at life cycle management through patent extension by modified release formulations or combining drugs. He said the company focussed little on the drug delivery of investigational products. The company had no financial projections at this point in time but was looking at the possibility of receiving royalties within three to five years.