Inspire to meet with regulators in Feb.

DURHAM -- Inspire Pharmaceuticals said Thursday that it will meet with regulators in February to lobby for its experimental dry-eye treatment, Prolacria.

Spokeswoman Jenny Kobin said that Inspire expects to get an update on the status of the dry-eye treatment, which twice has failed approval tests.

There's a chance that Prolacria eventually will pass regulatory muster, Unterberg Towbin analyst Andrew Fein wrote in a research report Thursday.

Restasis, a dry-eye drug developed by California-based Allergan, "endured a similarly difficult path to approval," Fein wrote. Restatis has been on the market for about three years, and Inspire sells the drug for Allergan, its partner.

Prolacria, which is also known as diquafosol, has a spotty record, failing two of four final tests designed to show that it worked better than saline solution.

Dry eye is a condition that occurs when the eyes don't produce enough tears to protect the eyeball.

Fein said a cystic fibrosis treatment is the most promising experimental drug in Inspire's pipeline. Cystic fibrosis is a hereditary lung disease that affects about 30,000 Americans.

But the cystic fibrosis treatment has the same scientific underpinnings as Prolacria.

As the company struggles to get a drug to market, Inspire is increasingly relying on promising chemicals discovered by others. Two of its four experimental treatments were discovered by other companies, and Inspire is paying for the rights to develop them, a process called licensing.

The licensed drugs replaced a clot buster and a retinal-disease treatment that were scrapped last year.