When Sanofi recalled Auvi-Q last October, it would be fair to say that a lot of people were upset. Plenty of people preferred the Auvi-Q to the EpiPen, and it isn’t hard to see why.
The Auvi-Q:
- Is smaller
- Is pocket-sized
- Talks to you
We’ve never carried Auvi-Qs, but that didn’t stop our kids from falling in love with the testers they received at our FARE walk last summer. It was months before I stopped hearing those instructions on a daily basis. (Although on the other hand, the Auvi-Q tester is also how our son Zax learned that Epis have needles inside them, and aren’t just magic devices that deliver medicine, which has led to greater Epi fear around here…)
Anyway, I digress. Just yesterday we heard the news that Sanofi is not going to be bringing the Auvi-Q back.
HOWEVER!
Here are some things you might not know (especially if you haven’t read the article yet.)
- Sanofi did not develop the Auvi-Q. They licensed it from Kaleo, a pharmaceutical company founded by twin brothers Eric and Evan Edwards. Both have life-threatening food allergies of their own. The two were determined to create a better epinephrine device, and they tailored their post-graduate education to do just that.
- Kaleo is alive and well, and currently sells another device, Evzio, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Auvi-Q. It delivers emergency medication to treat an opiod overdose. There has been no news that Evzio has had any problems.
- Kaleo has a number of options regarding how to proceed here, including producing the Auvi-Q themselves or licensing the device to another company. I’m not going to speculate as to what they’ll do. It is, of course, far too soon to tell. And there’s no word in this round of news regarding how the problem that led to the recall is being resolved.
But I will say this. The Auvi-Q was the flagship product of Kaleo and the Edwards brothers. The company is larger than those two, and it has grown, but at its core it came from the desire of two teenage boys to carry a better epinephrine auto-injector. It was their passion project.
The way I see it, the Auvi-Q coming back on the market is just a matter of time.
