Innovative, collaborative and well-resourced, Wilmer’s researchers continue to lead the way in the bold quest to cure blinding eye disease.
Kannan Rangaramanujam, Ph.D., co-director of the Center for Nanomedicine at Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine, is brimming with excitement as he shares the recent results of a phase IIa clinical trial of an innovative, systemic, precision nanomedicine that he and his team pioneered through Ashvattha Therapeutics, a startup company he co-founded.
“It’s a rather stunning proof of concept,” says Rangaramanujam, the Arnall Patz Distinguished Professor of Ophthalmology, about the dendrimer-drug targeted treatment model. When delivered monthly through an injection in fatty tissue, the treatment showed a 67% reduction in the need for intravitreal injections (i.e., shots in the eye) for patients with wet age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. What’s more, the impact was systemic — both eyes, including the noninjected eye, benefitted.
By reducing the need for costly eye injections, such subcutaneous treatments, delivered at home, could vastly expand access to sight-saving therapy for people around the world, he says. Also critical: Treatment can begin during earlier stages of the disease, before damage to eyesight has occurred.
Rangaramanujam, who holds more than 150 patents and is launching three other new companies, is just one of dozens of faculty entrepreneurs at Wilmer. These faculty members are employed full time at Johns Hopkins as researchers and clinicians, but they work with the university and oversight committees to create companies to bring their treatments to market. They are supported by Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures (JHTV), launched in 2014, which offers research space in its two FastForward accelerators — one in East Baltimore, the other near the Homewood campus — as well as guidance on licensing and patent filing.
