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Bringing drug therapy to the inner ear
Spiral Therapeutics is a clinical-stage company focused exclusively on the inner ear. Our pipeline targets balance disorders, hearing preservation and the underlying biology of hearing loss.
Our team brings together inner ear medicine and ophthalmology, the field that solved precise local drug delivery a generation ago. We applied those lessons to the ear and built MICS™ (Minimally Invasive Cochlear System), together with local formulations matched to each drug substance.
Named after the cochlea, the spiral-shaped organ of hearing. The inner ear is our focus.
Why inner ear drugs have failed in the clinic
Over the past decade, several companies took inner ear drugs into late-stage trials, and most of them failed. We studied those programs closely, including their clinical data. In many cases the biology was sound. The programs failed for two practical reasons.
Drug delivery
Drugs given by mouth or by vein can't reach the inner ear at safe and effective levels, so the drug has to be placed locally. A single injection of solution behind the eardrum washes out quickly.
MICS places our local formulations at the round window membrane under direct visualization, in the clinic under local anesthesia.
Clinical strategy
Inner ear diagnoses often rely on subjective criteria, subtypes are still being defined and many outcomes are self-reported. That noise buries real effects.
We use prior trial data to select the patients most likely to respond, choose cleaner endpoints and move quickly into human studies.
We built Spiral to fix both: precise local placement and trials designed around what earlier programs taught us.