OKYO Pharma Ltd, the biopharmaceutical company developing medicine targeting people with eye disease and ocular pain, says it will know for certain if its lead asset, OK-101, is an effective treatment by mid-2023.
The eyedrop drug could potentially skip straight through into phase two human trials if its investigational new drug application (IND), expected to be filed in the third quarter of 2022, is approved.
Speaking to Proactive, OKYO’s chief executive Gary Jacob said that “by the middle of 2023, we're going to absolutely know whether this drug works.”
As a result, the pharma company will be able to speed up the drug testing and approval process, meaning it can get the drug out to the people who suffer with dry eye diseases, which Jacob estimates to be in the millions worldwide.
“We're really pleased to hear that we could go straight through to phase two once the IND has been approved because the quicker you can get through the clinical development to an approval, the better of course for all the patients.”
“We're talking about a major unmet medical need, with literally 10s of millions of people in the US and over 700 million people worldwide that suffer from dry disease.”
At the time of publication, OKYO was up 7.63%.