Feb 6, 2024
Laxminarayan Bhat, Founder, President, and CEO of Reviva Pharmaceuticals, is focused on developing next-generation therapies for neurological diseases, particularly schizophrenia. Their lead candidate, brilaroxazine, acts on multiple neuro receptors to balance imbalanced neurotransmitters in the brain that are responsible for causing schizophrenia. This new molecule shows positive results in efficacy and a low discontinuation rate, indicating the drug can be used for acute and long-term maintenance therapy.
Lax elaborates, "Reviva is a late-stage pharmaceutical company. We are focused on developing next-generation therapies for diseases of neuro targets. That's our primary focus. So, currently, we are focused on CNS, inflammatory, and cardiometabolic diseases. We use chemical genomics-driven technologies to develop new chemical entities. Currently, we have two molecules in development. One is brilaroxazine, which is also called RP5063. The second molecule is RP1208. Both molecules were discovered in-house."
"For schizophrenia, there are several treatments available. Collectively there are around 13 new drugs that got approved in the last 40 years. There are still significant unmet needs in the treatment of schizophrenia because schizophrenia is not a single disease. Instead, it's a mix of multiple symptoms. So, developing new therapies that can address multiple symptom domains is quite challenging. That's what we are currently working on in our drug brilaroxazine. We believe that it ideally can treat major symptom domains with benign or fewer side effects."
"There are reports - all research-level - they're not accepted as a confirmatory test. For example, biomarkers called inflammatory biomarkers like BDNF and cytokines. There are several clinical research reports published, their links to or their association with the severity of schizophrenia. They're shown as the disease progresses the changes in these biomarkers. However, they are not validated to use as a definitive test for evaluating schizophrenia."
"Then, recently, with the advancement of AI or computer techniques, there is the voice biomarker. The way schizophrenia patients speak, in general, psychiatric patients' speech has a distinguishable pattern. That's also being used as a marker to evaluate the severity in this patient population. So, in the just-completed study, we evaluated both blood-based markers as cytokines and are currently evaluating voice biomarker. So, the data will be available soon."
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