Spray to help you sleep

Silicon Valley startup Sprayable has sold more than 40,000 bottles of its topical caffeine spray since launching it in 2013. The goal is to make caffeine more agreeable to people who can't stomach coffee or energy drinks. The recommended dose of four to six sprays contains less caffeine than a cup of coffee and provides a more even boost, says co-founder Ben Yu, a Harvard dropout who started pursuing the idea after participating in billionaire Peter Thiel's fellowship for teenagers who skip college.

The business has a new product that uses the same transdermal technology for the opposite effect: helping people get to sleep.

Yu, 22, and his co-founder, Deven Soni, 35, kicked off a crowdfunding campaign this week to sell at least $36,000 worth of orders by this summer. A 5 milliliter bottle containing 30 squirts has water, a derivative of the amino acid tyrosine, and the hormone melatonin, which the human body produces at night to regulate the sleep wake cycle.

Sprayable's innovation is making melatonin molecules more soluble in water by encapsulating them.

Compared with swallowing melatonin and losing most of it to the digestive process, absorbing the hormone through the skin means "you can much better control the dose, and the amount is much closer to the body's natural production level," says Yu.

To avoid regulatory hurdles, Sprayable is borrowing from its original playbook for caffeine. The new formula doesn't require approval from the US Food and Drug Administration because the agency classifies it as an over-thecounter cosmetic, says Yu.

Melatonin is safe for short-term use, says M Safwan Badr, chief of the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit. Badr recently took melatonin to recover from jet lag. Still, he cautions that its long-term effects are unknown: "If you asked me I would tell you to talk to your doctor first."

Yu notes his spray contains far less melatonin than pills. "In those times where you can't get enough sleep, or you have jet lag, it's perfect time to use something like this to really train your body to get back on schedule." Yu refrains from projecting this year's sales, although he says feedback from many of the roughly 1,000 people who have tried the sleep spray makes him confident of its mass appeal.

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