About Aisa Pharma

Aisa Pharma is dedicated to bringing new disease-modifying treatments to patients with rare serious diseases that are seldom the target of big pharma development programs and have few effective treatment options. The FDA defines rare diseases as being “orphan” when they affect <200,000 individuals in the United States. Aisa believes that select drugs belonging to a class of medicines called calcium channel blockers commonly used to treat high blood pressure, can be “repurposed” to treat some of these rare diseases potentially providing further benefits when used alone and combined with other drugs and that these may improve efficacy as well as safety and tolerability. There are several types of calcium channels and Aisa believes that by selectively blocking certain calcium channels other than those targeted by existing drugs, that a differentiated treatment effect will be demonstrated. Aisa is initially focused on drugs that target the N-calcium channel specifically because of its role in the vasculature, heart, kidney, and nervous system.

“Re-purposing” a drug that’s approved for another indication, gives Aisa like other companies that have employed this approach, the assurance that the drug can be dosed safely, as well as information on dose. Many successful drugs have been approved through repurposing development programs and have enjoyed greater success in their repurposed use than in the original indication.  This significantly reduces the risk of development failure (by more than 50%), since most development candidates fail to get approved because of side effects, and it reduces the cost ten-fold as well as the time for approval since the prior safety database for the drug can often be leveraged in the application process. The FDA has confirmed to AISA that this can be done with AISA 021. Almost a third of new drug approvals are repurposed drugs and some recent examples of approved repurposed drugs and their repurposed use include remdesevir for COVID, sildenafil for ED (Viagra and Revatio), minoxidil for hair growth (Rogaine), azathioprine for transplant rejection, thalidomide for leprosy, and methotrexate for Rheumatoid Arthritis.

Aisa has begun its development program with a plan to repurpose cilinidipine, a widely-used calcium channel blocker approved in Asia to treat high blood pressure that has unique N-channel blocking activity for the purpose of treating Raynaud’s symptoms in patients with scleroderma. Aisa started the Phase 2 RECONNOITER  study in  2021 to investigate the safety and efficacy of the drug combination in 76 patients with the disease.

Aisa is a privately funded and owned biopharma development company.   To learn more about Aisa, contact us at info@aisapharma.com.