CILcare, a CRO specializing in hearing disorders, announced that the company and its partner, CBSET Inc, a not-for-profit translational research institute, have been nominated to receive a Prix Galien MedStartUp award for their collaboration in fighting hearing loss; the collaborators are nominated in the category ‘Best Collaboration Dedicated to the Developing or Underserved Populations Worldwide.’
The Galien MedStartUp “fosters, recognizes, and rewards excellence in scientific innovation to improve the state of human health” and is awarded by the Prix Galien Foundation. Previously staged in New York, this year the Prix Galien Medstartup Award will be a digital event to be held on October 28-29, 2020. A focal point of the program is the active participation of the “most innovative start-up companies” (eg, CILcare) who are working with US partners (eg, CBSET) to share research and support global commercial development of promising lead technologies.
“Hearing loss is at epidemic prevalence with almost half a billion people affected worldwide with no approved drugs to treat hearing loss and huge unmet medical needs,” said Celia Belline, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of CILcare. “While there are hundreds of companies developing drugs, gene, and cell therapies in this field, they all face the same challenge: How to translate research at the bench into efficient-proven therapeutic solutions for patients. We have never been so close to succeeding. The last decade has ushered tremendous progress in the understanding of the pathophysiology and pathogenesis of hearing disorders. Emerging auditory tests, especially objective ones such as those we have developed, will help speed-up the translation of these exciting therapies.“
“Though great progress is being made toward understanding the genesis of hearing loss, translation of promising fresh approaches into human clinical trials has been sluggish,” said Rami Tzafriri, PhD, director of research and innovation for CBSET. “This reflects multifactorial challenges ranging from the need to identify the relevant target populations and safe and efficacious compounds, to the need to better understand and overcome physiological barriers to inner ear drug delivery and the relative paucity of expert labs focusing on this disease.”
“With GLP-compliant and AAALAC-accredited, state-of-the-art laboratories along with novel expertise, the CILcare and CBSET partnership is strongly positioned to continue to assist drug developers in generating the requisite preclinical safety studies as part of their regulatory application,” said Peter Markham, President and CEO, CBSET. “Without a single marketed drug therapy to restore hearing loss, and an aging population, the need for therapies is dire and growing. The CILcare / CBSET collaboration is empowering us to contribute to the development of promising new drug therapies,”
Source: CILcare
Image: CILcare, CBSET
