Qnovia is determined to tackle the world’s leading cause of preventable death and disease by helping the world’s one billion smokers to successfully quit. The WHO estimates that approximately eight million people die every year as a result of smoking and tobacco-related consumption. Qnovia believes it is our moral imperative to help curb this public health crisis.

The smoking cessation landscape is a complicated and contentious topic; largely because the world has resigned itself to think along bifurcated lines: RRPs (Reduced Risk Products) vs. NRTs (Nicotine Replacement Therapies).

Notably, NRTs have suffered from an innovation drought for almost two decades, and although RRPs serve an important function in advancing harm reduction, the emphasis needs to be placed on a therapeutic outcome – to curb withdrawal symptoms and to ultimately provide a safe and effective mechanism for cessation.

Today’s NRT landscape provides little if any incremental cessation improvement due to the lack of novel innovations aimed at achieving long-term, sustained quit rates. This is why the current NRT cessation improvement rates are only marginally better, (around 4-7%), when compared to simply quitting cold turkey.

No other industry has been beset by such technological abandon for almost two decades—much less a market with one billion active global users and eight million annual preventable deaths. Where might we be today if the mobile phone industry stopped actively innovating in 1998?

Not only do today’s NRTs lack the oral-sensory-cue-induced behaviors that smokers have been accustomed to, these products simultaneously suffer from poor PK and sensorial values. Historically, these two inputs have not been improved upon in any legacy NRT product and as such, the status quo, has resulted as a co-contributor to significant and frequent addiction relapse. 

In the U.S. alone, about 60% of the roughly 40 million smokers want to actively quit. Yet, with the current available suite of NRT products and abysmal cessation rates, it is Qnovia’s opinion that much more needs to be done.