AAOpt 2022: What's in the pipeline for Tarsus

Aziz Mottiwala, the Chief Commercial Officer at Tarsus Pharmaceuticals, shares a pipeline update for the company during the 2022 American Academy of Optometry (AAOpt) meeting in San Diego.

Editor's note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi, I'm Aziz Mottiwala, the Chief Commercial Officer at Tarsus Pharmaceuticals. And we're delighted to be here at the American Academy of Optometry, where we have several exciting updates to share.

First, we recently submitted our NDA for TP-03, the first potential product to treat Demodex blepharitis. What that means is we submitted our application with the Food and Drug Administration for the approval of this product, and if all goes well, we anticipate having the product on the market in the back half of 2023.

Between now and then, we're extremely busy, focused on educating the market and building awareness of Demodex blepharitis in the eye care community. Starting with our campaign, "Look at the Lids." This is the first-ever Disease Day campaign focus on Demodex blepharitis. It features real patients and clinicians sharing the impact and prevalence of Demodex blepharitis, helping physicians understand that it is highly prevalent in their practices, and they can actually see these patients by just having their patients look down at the slit lamp. They don't need any special equipment or training, it literally just takes a couple of seconds. So we're excited that the campaign is rolled out [and] getting a lot of great feedback.

And we're complementing that with a continued effort to build scientific exchange. And we've done that by hiring our first field medical team. Many companies hire MSLs; we actually hired medical ambassadors, and why that is is they are trained optometrists, they're eye care doctors.

Who better to educate their eye care community than folks that have actually been in clinic and have seen these patients firsthand? We're really impressed with the quality of optometrists that we've been able to bring into the Tarsus team. And they're out there talking to the optometric community, the ophthalmology community, bringing, again, scientific rigor and exchange to the conversation on Demodex blepharitis.

So lots of exciting things going on. [We're] really delighted to have great meetings here at the conference, and look forward to seeing everybody soon and share more updates when we have them. Thank you.