Acorda Therapeutics Inc (ACORQ)

[Michel]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0692-z


"Dry powders are emerging as an alternative to aerosol delivery for inhalation. Acorda Therapeutics has a delivery platform based on dry powder inhalation. Acorda CEO Ron Cohen says their approach is to engineer powdered granules that resemble Wiffle balls. “There’s a lot of surface area because of all of the curves, so even a slight breeze, a slight breath is going to spin it. Just a regular, easy inhalation can get large amounts of the drug in.” Acorda’s pipeline does not include any nucleic acid therapeutics — it markets Inbrija, a levodopa inhalation powder for Parkinson’s disease — but the company’s chief medical officer, Burkhard Blank, says the technical aspects of designing a dry powder formulation should be similar. Blank says that Acorda had the opportunity to work on a messenger RNA program for a federal agency for an undisclosed virus that was not COVID-19. That mRNA product encoded antibodies against the virus. Blank says, “it was demonstrated that there was indeed in the lung the expression of antibodies.”