PolyActiva and RareSight Partner on Pediatric IRDs

PolyActiva and RareSight have officially announced a strategic research collaboration to develop first-in-class therapies for rare pediatric retinal diseases, specifically targeting conditions that currently have no approved drug treatments.

This collaboration aims to tackle early-onset vision loss by advancing long-acting pharmacologic therapies, offering new hope to affected children and their families.

Innovative Drug Delivery Platform: The PREZIA Advantage

At the core of this partnership is PolyActiva’s proprietary PREZIA™ platform, a cutting-edge drug delivery technology designed to produce new chemical entity (NCE)-eligible pro-drug candidates.

PREZIA enables sustained, targeted drug release directly to the retina without the need for repeated patient administration. Utilizing covalent bonding to attach therapeutic agents to a biodegradable polymer backbone, the platform ensures:

• Precise and customizable release durations, ranging from one week to over a year

• No residual buildup, supporting safe and effective repeat dosing

Executive and Clinical Perspectives on the Collaboration

Carmen Caricchio, CEO and Founder of RareSight, emphasized the transformative potential of this partnership:

“By combining RareSight’s therapeutic discovery and development expertise with PolyActiva’s novel drug delivery platform, this collaboration represents a major step toward transforming how inherited eye diseases are treated. Together, we are advancing a new class of long-acting pharmacologic therapies to address early-onset vision loss, with the potential to change a child’s life and bring hope to generations to come.”

Sandeep Grover, MD, a medical retina and inherited retinal disease specialist based in Jacksonville, Florida, shared his perspective:

"Children with inherited retinal diseases face lifelong visual challenges with no approved drug therapies. As a pioneer of the earliest research in this field and caring for kids and their families for more than two decades, I am encouraged by novel therapeutic strategies that support our goal of helping patients maintain vision, function, and independence as long as possible."