Kiora Pharmaceuticals Joins Global Genes' RARE-X Vision Consortium, A Corporate-Nonprofit Initiative Aimed At Advancing Research For Rare Ocular Disorders

Kiora Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:KPRX) and Global Genes today announced that Kiora has joined Global Genes' RARE-X Vision Consortium, a corporate-nonprofit partnership with a mission to promote and facilitate collaboration among advocacy, research, and industry stakeholders to advance research leading to vision-improving therapies. The Vision Consortium aims to transform the lives of people affected by rare ocular disorders by identifying clinical trial ready populations, ensuring meaningful outcome measures, and accelerating the development of clinical trial programs required to bring new treatments to patients.

The RARE-X Vision Consortium brings together multiple stakeholders with the goal to overcome shared challenges of successful drug development in a pre-competitive, open source environment. Data collected through the Vision Consortium programs will be available on a de-identified, individual patient level to researchers across academia, nonprofit organizations, and industry. Key solutions the Vision Consortium will provide include:

1. Patient Identification & Recruitment: Rare disease clinical trials often face challenges to identify and enroll patients. Through collaboration and community-led participation, the Vision Consortium is building a global, centralized data repository for individuals affected by rare ocular diseases.
   
   
   
    
2. Outcome Measures for Clinical Trials: Today's outcome measures may be inadequate for assessing meaningful changes in patients with rare ocular disorders, especially when loss of vision varies materially by condition. Through aggregating functional, structural, and patient reported outcome data, the Vision Consortium aims to identify endpoints that correlate with meaningful vision changes in patients' lives.
   
   
   
    
3. Inclusive Study Design & Planning: Integrating the patient voice into the design and conduct of clinical trials requires early and consistent outreach to the patient community, including outreach to individuals who may not be initially inclined to participate in clinical research. The Vision Consortium brings the input of individuals and families impacted by rare disorders of vision loss and represents a global population with a wide diversity of ages, stages of vision loss, and perspectives.

"We view Global Genes' leadership and coordinated efforts as playing an invaluable role in aiding drug developers working to bring new treatment options to patients," said Brian Strem, Ph.D., President and CEO of Kiora. "As a developer of a novel treatment for inherited retinal diseases, we believe in the value of bringing people together with a common, shared goal; namely accelerating the pathway to new therapies for rare ocular disease. The Global Genes team employs concrete steps to increase the probability of advancing our experimental therapy to potentially help more patients."