Biotech & drug delivery · Transdermal patches
Avro Life Science
Two University of Waterloo first years set out to put a generic allergy pill into a sticker. The patch has since become a platform aimed at nucleic acid drugs for the skin, and the public record still shows no registered trial and no FDA application.
The banana problem
Ask a parent why a child will not take an antihistamine and you get a version of the same answer. Shakir Lakhani gave it to TechCrunch in February 2018, a few weeks into his Y Combinator batch.
“There’s medications that say they taste like banana but don’t really taste like banana,” he said.
Avro Life Science’s answer was a sticker: a film the founders cast from a biopolymer mixed in a campus lab, loaded with a common allergy drug, and stuck on a forearm.
Their 2017 James Dyson Award entry put numbers on it: “a recent test that was successful in alleviating allergy symptoms in a human within 20 minutes of applying the patch,” and “Our analytical data shows >95% of the drug is released within 10 hours.” Nine years later that account of an unpublished test is still the most specific human data in the public file.
Why the skin is a hard door
The outer skin exists to keep molecules out, and it is good at it. A count of FDA drug labels carrying a transdermal route, run on September 23, 2026, is dominated by molecules the field settled on decades ago: nicotine, estradiol, rivastigmine, lidocaine, scopolamine, testosterone, fentanyl. Avro made the point from the other side in 2017, writing that only 2 over the counter patches existed in the USA and 20 more prescription patches.
The prize is real. A drug that crosses the skin skips the first pass through the liver. Lakhani put it this way in 2018: “One day we hope to allow large pharmaceutical companies to ‘rescue’ drugs that they spent billions of dollars developing, but failed trials due to low bioavailability, high liver toxicity from an entire pill being metabolized at once.”
It is also a crowded prize. Avro’s later pipeline named Parkinson’s disease as a lead indication, and a Parkinson’s patch already exists: rotigotine, sold as Neupro by UCB, approved under NDA 021829 on May 9, 2007. The bar is not whether a patch can work, but whether a new one beats the approved one.
Two first years and a dorm room
Lakhani started early, researching biomaterials at 15 and travelling nearly two hours by bus and train from Richmond Hill to a University of Toronto tissue engineering lab.
At Waterloo he met Keean Sarani in the Village 1 dormitory. Sarani had worked in community pharmacies through high school and held one of twenty four national spots in the conditional admission to pharmacy program. The two, related by marriage, launched the business in January 2016.
Lakhani’s own 2017 essay is unvarnished. The original team was four, not two, and one left. “I still think we’re at a super early stage, despite having a functional MVP and LOIs, so I hate it when my family brings up the success that we’ve had to date, because it’s really nothing so far,” he wrote.
The credentials came fast: Velocity Fund awards of $5,000 and $25,000 in 2016, national runner up for the James Dyson Award in 2017, Y Combinator in Winter 2018, and a Thiel Fellowship for Lakhani that June, carrying $100,000 and no equity. Then a seed round led by Fifty Years, with Susa Ventures, Garage Capital, Heuristic Capital, Embark Ventures, Uphonest Capital and Buckley Endeavours, which put about $2.2 million in the bank.
From generics to gene therapy
The company that raised that round was a generics business. The first drug tested was loratadine, and the plan was to sell patches of approved drugs so that only the delivery method needed proving.
By 2019 the pitch had shifted to licensing. An August press release called Avro a preclinical stage company “currently establishing co-development and licensing agreements with leading pharmaceutical companies prior to launching their own clinical programs in 2021.”
By 2021 the website described a passive ionic liquid platform called OmniDerm, with programs in Parkinson’s disease and ALS and a second ambition on top: local delivery of antisense oligonucleotides, siRNAs, mRNAs and CRISPR ribonucleoproteins into skin, without microneedles. Its aim, the site said, was to unlock the next generation of dermal therapies “in the same way that lipid nanoparticle technology unlocked the potential of mRNA vaccines.”
In March 2022 Sarani posted hiring notices from a new headquarters in Kitchener: “We are building the enabling vehicle to deliver novel drugs into the skin, starting with topical in-situ nucleic acid therapies.” As of September 2026 the site is live, the banner reads medical dermatology, and the navigation names two platforms, TopiqIL and TransdermIL, and two programs, AVR 235 and AVR 335. LinkedIn now reads “Delivering the future of nucleic acid dermatology” and lists 2 to 10 employees.
The pathway they named
One line in the 2017 Dyson entry is worth reading against the rulebook: “As a medical device and pharmaceutical combination product, our patch falls under Class II with the FDA. This pathway warrants 510(k) approval by demonstrating bioequivalence to current allergy products on the market.”
That is not how FDA regulates a drug loaded patch. The agency’s guidance on transdermal and topical delivery systems, issued by the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research in November 2019, covers what to include “in new drug applications (NDAs) and abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs).” A patch carrying an approved drug by a new route is an NDA question, most often a 505(b)(2) application. A 510(k) clears a device against a predicate. It does not approve a drug.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| US patents | US 10,576,043, granted Mar 3, 2020, and US 11,324,705, granted May 10, 2022, both to Avro Life Sciences, Inc., inventors Lakhani and Sarani. Claims cover a water and sweat resistant patch of 4 to 8 cm2 and its casting method. | Public record |
| FDA applications | None. The only Avro hits are hand wash listings from an unrelated firm. | Not found |
| Trials and papers | None. ClinicalTrials.gov returns zero for sponsor Avro and zero for OmniDerm. No PubMed record. | Not found |
| Stated regulatory route | The 2017 Dyson entry calls the patch a Class II combination product cleared by 510(k). FDA guidance places transdermal delivery systems in NDAs and ANDAs. | Differs from the record |
| Stated approval timeline | At the March 2018 demo day TechCrunch reported that “Avro says it’s on track for FDA approval by Q2 of 2019.” No application exists seven years later. | Differs from the record |
| Development stage | The site banner has read “A clinical stage biotech redefining the skin’s potential as a therapeutic vector” since at least September 2021. Lower on that same page, the mission text called Avro “a leading preclinical stage pharmaceutical company”. | Company claims disagree |
| Human testing | Symptom relief within 20 minutes in one person, over 95 percent release in 10 hours. Company-reported in 2017, never published. | Company-stated |
| Pharma relationship | Bayer Grants4Apps accelerator, listed as $10,000 plus support. No licensing or co-development agreement announced. | Company-stated |
| Funding | About $2.2 million seed reported by TechCrunch in June 2018, led by Fifty Years. No round reported since. | Independent |
Read plainly: granted intellectual property, a chemistry story investors found credible, and no external validation. Patents describe what you claim, not what works. The gap between a 2018 promise of FDA approval by mid 2019 and an empty regulatory file in late 2026 is the most important fact here, and the pivot from generic antihistamines to nucleic acid dermatology traded a short path for a very long one.
What to watch
- A first registered trial. Nothing about AVR 235 or AVR 335 enters the record until one appears.
- A named pharma partner for the 2019 licensing model.
- Any peer reviewed paper on the ionic liquid platform.
- A new financing. The last reported round closed in 2018.
- Whether the site settles on preclinical or clinical stage.
In their words
“There’s medications that say they taste like banana but don’t really taste like banana,”
Shakir Lakhani, co-founder and CEO, TechCrunch, February 2018 · Independent
“Really the breakthrough is the [proprietary] combination of materials that can hold all of these different drugs”
Shak Lakhani, TechCrunch, June 2018 · Independent
“I still think we’re at a super early stage, despite having a functional MVP and LOIs, so I hate it when my family brings up the success that we’ve had to date, because it’s really nothing so far.”
Shak Lakhani, personal essay, HackerNoon, 2017 · Founder-written
“When you deliver drugs transdermally, you significantly reduce liver toxicity and boost bioavailability. This means pharma can rescue drugs that just barely failed in Phase III. Pharma will pay a lot for this.”
Seth Bannon, co-founder, Fifty Years, to TechCrunch, June 2018 · Investor
“We are building the enabling vehicle to deliver novel drugs into the skin, starting with topical in-situ nucleic acid therapies.”
Keean Sarani, co-founder, LinkedIn hiring post, March 2022 · Company-stated
“Avro says it’s on track for FDA approval by Q2 of 2019.”
TechCrunch, Y Combinator W18 demo day report, March 2018 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordUS Patents 10,576,043 and 11,324,705
- Public recordTransdermal and Topical Delivery Systems, and Applications Covered by Section 505(b)(2)
- Public recordopenFDA: Neupro NDA 021829, transdermal label counts, null Avro searches
- Public recordClinicalTrials.gov and SEC EDGAR searches, both returning nothing
- IndependentThree TechCrunch reports: the YC batch, the W18 demo day, and the seed round
- IndependentAvro wins national runners up for the James Dyson Award
- InvestorAvro portfolio page
- Founder-writtenStarting a startup in school
- CompanyJames Dyson Award 2017 project entry
- CompanyAvro website pipeline text, and the 2019 Advancements TV release
- CompanyAvro company page and Sarani hiring post; Y Combinator and Velocity directory entries
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
