Miist Therapeutics Brings a Modern Approach to Fighting Nicotine Addiction
After witnessing a wave of vaping addiction at college, Dalton Signor partnered with an expert in inhaled medications to create a more effective nicotine cessation device, one that delivers relief quickly and titrates medication accurately.
Challenge
One of the public health success stories we’ve witnessed in recent years has been the decline in youth cigarette smoking. According to recent data from the University of Michigan, youth smoking dropped to an all-time low of 2.3% in 2021 — down from nearly 23% in 2000. This is incredibly positive news, as we know smoking has a negative impact on nearly every bodily organ.
However, one of the tools used to curb youth smoking has spawned a new problem. E-cigarettes, first introduced in the 2000s as a smoking cessation tool, have risen in popularity among young people. Today, there are 11 million e-cigarette users, many of whom would never have considered cigarette smoking but found vaping as an easy on-ramp to nicotine use and are now addicted.
While vaping is less harmful than smoking cigarettes, experts — and a growing body of research — agree that vaping is bad for the body.
“Emerging data suggests links to chronic lung disease and asthma, as well as associations between dual use of e-cigarettes and smoking with cardiovascular disease,” writes Michael Blaha, MD, director of clinical research at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Heart Disease.
One thing that appears unique about e-cigarette addiction among youth is that the majority of users would like to quit, but can’t. This problem caught the attention of Dalton Signor when he was going to college at Villanova University.
“From what I’ve seen personally I would say it would be typical for perhaps 40% of students to own an e-cigarette and up to 70% to use one on a weekly basis.” Signor said, who added that, anecdotally, he believes that many users would give up nicotine if there were an effective way to do so. “I started talking to these people and I said ‘Hey look, why are you smoking? Why are you using e-cigarettes?’ Pretty much across the board, the feedback that I got was, ‘Well, I’m hooked on this and there’s no easy way to quit, so I’m not even going to bother trying.’”
People have become so used to the idea that the pills, patches, and gums we have as treatments today don’t work that they’ve given up on trying to use them. Signor decided if he could come up with an effective treatment to curb nicotine addiction from cigarettes and e-cigarettes — one that takes into account the physical habits formed by smoking — he could do more than just make people physically healthier. He could help nicotine users regain control over their lives.
Origin Story
Dalton Signor was a freshman at Villanova University studying management consulting, when he started noticing how many of his friends were vaping.
“ I had multiple close friends of mine who were heavily addicted to e-cigarettes, and I had a very clear line of sight into how that was undermining their life, their work, their school, all of that.” Signor said.
The tipping point for Signor wasn’t realizing how many of his college friends were vaping, but realizing how many of his younger sister’s 13-year-old friends were. “Currently we have a system where if you make one poor decision as a kid and start smoking cigarettes or e-cigarettes, as so many now are, you’re going to be addicted forever. That needs to change.” Signor said.
At the end of his freshman year, Signor began working to find a solution to treat nicotine addiction in a way that would be effective for young people.
For the treatment to work, it had to maintain the social and behavioral aspect of smoking. The treatment needed to be something that cigarette and e-cigarette users could inhale to activate the same reward response that comes with smoking. This meant that one of the most important things would be nailing the development of a new inhalation technology.
Signor reached out to engineers at Aradigm, which was previously one of the leading inhaled drug delivery companies. Each engineer he spoke with pointed him to one person: Jeffrey Schuster, PhD, an astrophysicist renowned for his work in inhaled drug delivery. Schuster agreed to join the Miist team and help build a better inhalation device for smoking cessation.
During his junior year, Signor’s idea caught the eye of Entrepreneur First, a European talent investor, who wanted his team to move to London. Signor left school, and for four months operated out of London, raising more than $250,000 to develop their product. Then it was back to the US, where they set up a lab in San Francisco and recruited one more key member of the team, Signor’s longtime friend and biomedical engineer Eric Ezerins.
Under the Hood
The question that Signor had to answer building Miist was, “Why are the current smoking cessation methods on the market not working and how can we develop something that does?” Signor came to the conclusion that marrying the behavioral experience of smoking with the neurobiology of the addiction would be the key to creating a successful treatment.
They began developing a treatment that delivered a very similar user experience to smoking, relieved cravings as fast as a cigarette, and slowly and automatically ramped down the delivered dose of medicine over time to wean the user off their nicotine addiction without causing cravings and withdrawals.
“It is important that at first you can provide nearly the exact user experience and feeling that one gets from smoking a cigarette, and then you need to slowly ramp down that experience in a very controlled way. That’s where our technology comes in,” explains Signor.
The most common methods of nicotine replacement therapy come in patches or chewing gum. Like Miist Therapeutics, these methods use medical-grade, FDA-approved nicotine. The problem is they take anywhere from 30–40 minutes to satisfy a nicotine craving, which often leaves smokers relapsing. By creating an advanced inhalation system that mimics an e-cigarette, Miist satisfies that craving almost instantly.
“We’ve built a novel system that is multidose, meaning that it doesn’t require any setup or cleaning like today’s nebulizers, and it has incredibly advanced dosing controls that have not yet been developed in an inhaler,” Signor said.
The advanced dosing controls built into Miist allows users to wean off of nicotine over a 90-day period. Each day, the device slowly decreases the amount of nicotine in each puff the user takes.
Their next big step is taking Miist into a human clinical trial where a dozen smokers test the treatment and measure its efficacy. They’ve partnered with Yale University where they will be working with some of the top doctors in the field to test the impact this new treatment can make with real smokers.
Why We’re Proud to Invest
StartUp Health is proud to back Miist Therapeutics because of their dedication to creating a solution for smoking addiction that meets the user where they are. While many forms of treatment were created in good faith, they fail to take into account the user experience, which might just be the key to actually helping smokers kick their habit to the curb.
“These are people that told me, ‘I will never try the patch, I will never try the gums,’ or ‘I’ve already tried them and they don’t work,’” Signor said, explaining how important it was to create a treatment that didn’t get rid of the behavioral aspect of vaping or smoking.
On top of user experience, Miist Therapeutics is prioritizing the health of smokers.
“When you vaporize e-liquid, in the vaporization process, you’re changing the chemical nature of the liquid and you’re creating formaldehyde and acetaldehyde which are both known carcinogens,” Signor said.
Miist, while creating a similar experience to e-cigarettes and vaporizers, doesn’t actually burn any liquid in the cartridge. Miist utilizes FDA-approved inhalation technology that is completely heatless, allowing them to solve smoking addiction in a way that is both effective and safe.
Finally, we’re supporting Miist Therapeutics because of Signor’s dedication to the health of the next generation. Young teenagers are getting addicted to vaping, leading to lifelong health problems. Signor witnessed this firsthand, with his own sister, and that direct view into the problem propels him towards innovation while others stick to the status quo.
Join us in welcoming Dalton Signor and the Miist Therapeutics team to the StartUp Health family.
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Published: Feb 10, 2023