We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing medicines to target diseases driven by abnormally elevated aldosterone. Our product candidate, lorundrostat, is a proprietary, orally administered, highly selective aldosterone synthase inhibitor (ASI) that we are initially developing for the treatment of patients with uncontrolled hypertension (uHTN), defined as individuals who are unable to achieve BP of below 130/80 mmHg despite taking two or more lines of antihypertensive medication or resistant hypertension (rHTN), defined as individuals who are unable to achieve BP of below 130/80 mmHg despite taking three or more antihypertensive medications typically including a diuretic. In the United States, there are over 115 million patients who have sustained elevated blood pressure (BP), or hypertension and more than half of this population fails to achieve their BP goals, defined as BP of 130/80 mmHg with currently available medications.
There are over 30 million treated patients who do not achieve their BP goal, of whom approximately 20 million have systolic BP levels greater than 140 mmHg. Patients with hypertension that persists despite taking two or more medications have 1.8 and 2.5 times greater mortality risk due to either cardiovascular disease or stroke, respectively. In a Phase 2 clinical trial evaluating 200 subjects with uHTN and rHTN (Target-HTN), lorundrostat demonstrated a clinically meaningful and statistically significant reduction in BP with once-daily dosing and was well tolerated. In addition to hypertension, we intend to develop lorundrostat for the treatment of chronic kidney disease (CKD) and believe that our product candidate holds promise to be an innovative solution for the rapidly growing unmet need in multiple cardiorenal disorders.
Hypertension is one of the most common medical conditions globally, afflicting approximately 1.3 billion people and resulting in an estimated average of $130 billion annual economic burden in the United States alone between 2003 and 2014. Despite the availability of multiple treatment options, including thiazide diuretics, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE)-inhibitors, angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), calcium channel blockers, beta blockers, and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (MRAs), the prevalence of uHTN continues to grow, further exacerbated by the rapidly rising rate of obesity.
Over 30 million hypertensive patients in the United States are unable to achieve their BP goal despite treatment. Within this population there are approximately 10.3 million patients suffering from rHTN. Multiple large-scale studies have demonstrated that patients who fail to achieve their BP goal have a significantly elevated risk of developing heart disease, stroke and kidney disease (Wright JT Jr, et al. A randomized trial of intensive versus standard blood-pressure control. N Engl J Med. 2015;373(22):2103-2116; and Zhou, et al., Uncontrolled Hypertension Increases Risk of All-Cause and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality in US Adults: the NHANES III Linked Mortality Study. Scientific Reports, 2018;8(1):1-7).
Patients with rHTN have a 1.5 and 2.3 times higher risk than normotensive patients for composite cardiovascular events and end-stage renal disease, respectively. Notwithstanding this significant and growing unmet need, there has been a lack of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved novel therapies targeting hypertension, with no new class of antihypertensive treatment approved within the last fifteen years.
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We are a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing medicines to target diseases driven by abnormally elevated aldosterone. Our product candidate, lorundrostat, is a proprietary, orally administered, highly selective aldosterone synthase inhibitor (ASI) that we are initially developing for the treatment of patients with uncontrolled hypertension (uHTN), defined as individuals who are unable to achieve BP of below 130/80 mmHg despite taking two or more line More
