Feeling No Pain

By in-licensing Lidocaine, a needle-free anesthetic ready for phase III testing from PowderJect and obtaining rights to PowderJect's needle-free drug delivery platform, the one-year-old pain management company AlgoRx has transformed itself overnight from a six-person shop with a pre-IND candidate to a drug-development company. Now it faces the challenges of late stage development and creating a pipeline with its injection technology platform. For a 15% stake in AlgoRx, PowderJect is glad to have finally divested its drug delivery business so it can focus on vaccines, an area which, through a series of acquisitions, is moving the company into the black.