Letter from President and CEO
Dear Shareholder,
As the new President and CEO at InMed, I’m reaching out to you to provide you with my impressions after my first 3 weeks at the company, and to give you some insight into what I see as the operational priorities for InMed moving forward.
As I have become more familiar with the rationale and science behind InMed’s technology I have had two key observations: I was impressed with the level of detail and science behind the process of identifying new potential candidates, and I was struck by the number of potential opportunities that were available to InMed within the cannabinoid space.
I believe InMed’s process of drug discovery is quite sophisticated, and much more advanced than what is being used by most companies developing natural products, and in particular compared to other pharma companies developing cannabinoids. This is promising as this means that our products have been rationally targeted and designed and therefore should be both effective and potent. The potential number of indications in which InMed could be active is numerous. Cannabinoids have been shown to play a role in a number of human physiological systems, and the potential to mediate a therapeutic effect has been observed in multiples therapeutic areas including infectious diseases, metabolic diseases, respiratory diseases, ocular diseases, oncology and dermatology. The breadth of indications available with our technology presents a wealth of opportunity for InMed, however initially, to utilize our resources effectively, we will focus our development portfolio on two indications, epidermolysis bullosa (EB) and glaucoma.
Epidermolyis bullosa is an orphan disease mostly commonly seen in children and characterized by patients with very fragile skin. Even a slight brushing against a patient’s skin can cause severe blistering and redness, and many of these children spend most of their life in bandages. Currently the only treatment option for patients with EB is the same as that for the treatment of burns. We believe there is a significant opportunity for a new product that has been developed specifically for EB. INM-750 was designed specifically to address both the underlying cause of EB, and to treat the most commons symptoms. We intend to start clinical trials with INM-750 in EB in 2016.
Glaucoma is an eye disease that is one of the leading causes of blindness in the developing world. It is generally caused by high blood pressure in the eye (high intraocular pressure or IOP) which puts pressure on the optic nerve resulting in blindness. Currently, all the approved medications for glaucoma work by lowering IOP. Physicians are seeking novel medications that have a different mechanism of action to treat those patients that don’t respond well to current medications. InMed is developing INM-085 which has been designed not only to provide a new mechanism to lower IOP but also to provide a neuroprotective effect to the optic nerve. Glaucoma is a significant opportunity which currently represents a $5.6 B market globally. We plan to initiate our clinical trials in glaucoma in late 2016
I am quite excited about the science and technology at InMed and about the potential for our development candidates INM-750 and INM-085 to provide a meaningful contribution to patients. I have enclosed for you a copy of our revised company presentation that outlines our strategy for moving forward. This will provide you with much more detail about out platform, and the potential of our products.
http://www.inmedpharma.com/i/pdf/presentations/InMed-Presentation-Oct2015.pdf
Best regards,
Paul Brennan,
President & CEO