Benzinga | Jul 28, 2021 05:32PM EDT

Atai Launches New "Nose-To-Brain" Drug Delivery Company To Interact With Its Portfolio Of Psychedelics Subsidiaries

Atai Life Sciences (NASDAQ:ATAI) is launching a new company that will interact with its portfolio of psychedelics and tech start-ups looking at novel mental health treatments.

InnarisBio Inc., as the company has been baptized, is being launched as a collaboration between Atai and UniQuest, a company managing and commercializing intellectual property developed by The University of Queensland in Australia.

InnarisBio's mission is to perfect intranasal drug delivery technology to improve treatments for mental health disorders. Its "sol-gel intranasal drug delivery platform technology" was developed in the laboratory of researcher Dr. Harendra Parekh at the University of Queensland.

The "nose-to-brain" technology delivers pharmaceutical compounds as a liquid at room temperature which becomes a gel at body temperature.

"InnarisBio aims to be a revolutionary technology company for intranasal drug delivery in the treatment of CNS [central nervous system] disorders," said Florian Brand, CEO and co-founder of Atai.

According to the company, traditional drug delivery methods can be problematic in the treatment of central nervous system disorders due to the blood-brain barrier that restricts the entry of therapeutic agents in the central nervous system. Nose-to-brain delivery has the potential to be a painless and non-invasive administration route.

Brand said the newly-formed company has the potential to be superior to other intranasal drug delivery methods available by improving uptake through mucoadhesion in the nose, thus reducing dose administered and dosing frequency.

Atai plans to explore the potential use of this technology for a variety of psychedelic and non-psychedelic compounds under its development.

Photo by British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) on Wikimedia Commons.