VIDEO: Dry eye treatments in the pipeline

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Well to date, I think that there's two therapies that I'm most excited about. The first is actually keratolytic product from Azura Pharmaceuticals. And Azura has developed this keratolytic, basically it's applied to the eye and the eyelid. And what happens is that, so the meibom is, in meibomian gland disease in particular, is thought to be kind of too thick and you know, isn't free flowing like an olive oil. And so by breaking those bonds between the keratin molecules, you can actually improve the flow of the meibom and help relieve obstruction. And so this, you know, it's currently in clinical trials, if approved would be the first FDA approved product that's a topical therapy, a prescription therapy, for MGD, which I think has great implications. You know, we know that many patients suffer from MGD, and we really don't currently have a pharmaceutical treatment for that.

The other product that I'm super excited about is actually TP-03 from Tarsus Pharmaceuticals. And so this is actually lotilaner, which is a molecule that has effects against Demodex. We are really learning so much about Demodex to date. It's not something that, of course, there's been articles in the literature, but just from the clinical side, it's not something that we often look for, can be easily missed. And it turns out that there's a lot of Demodex blepharitis that is out there just in the natural population, but also in our dry eye disease patients, it can coexist. And so I think this will be really exciting. We'll hopefully find out later this year if it gets FDA approved, but certainly will be a welcomed adjunct to our dry eye treatment armamentarium.