JUST STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE LOCAL FIRM HAS BIG PLANS FOR STRIPS.

Byline: Brent Hopkins Staff Writer

WOODLAND HILLS - It starts with a cough, a hacking wheeze and uncontrolled sneezing. Cold season is well under way, but a Woodland Hills start-up may have a way to lick it.

By loading active ingredients into dissolvable, translucent strip of material used in breath fresheners, InnoZen Inc. hopes consumers can curtail coughs without lugging around pill packages and bottles of syrup. Recently introduced locally in Sav-On and Albertsons stores, the Suppress Cough strip has quickly become a big seller for the over-the-counter health products developer.

``If you've got a pill and you don't have any water, that's awful,'' said Matthew Lipton, who serves as InnoZen's vice president of sales and president of the Suppress division. ``With a syrup, you need a spoon or a cup. This makes the medicine taste good.''

For InnoZen, that medicine becomes further sweetened by its potential. Though presently limited to two varieties of cough suppressants and a licensed Chloraseptic throat strip, the delivery system should play a big role in growing the company from its current base of 10 employees and $1 million in annual sales. Based on the initial success of the products, the company plans a whole line of remedies sold in strip form under the Suppress brand name.

``This will be a whole umbrella brand,'' Lipton said. ``We've got a pain product, an antacid and an allergy product ready to go. I'd like to do a travel kit with everything you need right there in a wallet.''

Though Lipton said customers have responded favorably to the delivery system, Dr. Llorens Pembrook, a Sherman Oaks internal medicine specialist, had his doubts. Fearing that consumers would avoid a trip to their physician when they could pick from over-the-counter relief, he cautioned that nonprescription remedies won't necessarily cure all ailments.

``Do all medications get absorbed in the tongue? No,'' Pembrook said. ``The enzymes in your mouth break down foodstuffs, so no one knows for sure if they make it all the way down the digestive tract.''

But Prestige Brands Inc., which owns Chloraseptic, has found early success with the system, as its first major adopter. It used the technology as an alternative form of delivery for its sore throat spray, debuting a cherry-flavored strip in 2003 and adding citrus and grape variants this year.

``Our impression is that consumers are very into strips and are accepting them more and more in different medicinal areas,'' said Michael Fink, a senior vice president for Prestige. ``There's been fairly amazing growth in the strips category.''

With just the current product line, InnoZen expects to sell several million units this season, grossing millions of dollars. Relying on the patent-pending technology, which combines powder-coated active ingredients with the thin, gummy strips, the company expects it could make the jump from over-the-counter remedies into prescription drug delivery.

``We want to be known as the medicine-in-a-strip company,'' Lipton said. ``We wanted to get into a big market, so we're absolutely looking at prescription drugs, veterinary and everything else.''

Brent Hopkins, [phone]

brent.hopkins(at)dailynews.com

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- 2 -- color) Benjamin Thomas, above, creates test strips of medicine in the labs of InnoZen's Woodland Hills facility, to supply clinical trials for the company's Suppress cough strips, left, with the company's president, Matthew Lipton.

Evan Yee/Staff Photographer