Developing Effective Therapeutics to Treat Neurodegenerative Disease

Focusing on Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
ALSP Inc. is a privately held company based in San Diego, California, developing small molecule drugs for treating neurodegenerative diseases, initially focused on traumatic brain injury (TBI). Each year traffic accidents, falls, assaults, whether military or domestic, and sports injuries account for millions of incidences of traumatic injury to the brain requiring costly treatment in the emergency room and intensive care units with hundreds of thousands requiring hospitalization. These injuries initiate an inflammatory reaction that can cause a lesion in the brain that, depending on severity, often results in lasting brain deficits that can severely impair the productivity and quality of life for the individual sustaining the injury. These deficits include, but are not limited to, impaired memory, reduced attention span and mental flexibility, an inability to focus mentally, and impaired motor skills. The financial burden resulting from these injuries ranges into the tens of billions of dollars even though there is as yet no approved drug to treat the condition. We are advancing our proprietary compound, which prevents what is known as the inflammasome from being activated, with an eye toward clinical trials for the treatment of TBI. By employing a novel and flexible clinical strategy and a close working relationship with the FDA we anticipate being able to achieve accelerated approval from the FDA to market what has the potential to be the first drug to treat TBI and establish a proof of principle for the applicability of this class of drugs to other forms of neurodegeneration, each of which also has blockbuster potential to treat millions of people. Learn more about our development stratgy

"Traumatic brain injury causes the release of powerful enzymes, especially cathepsin B and calpain, which kill neurons, activate inflammation and break down the blood vascular wall. These pathologies can cause behavioral and cognitive dysfunction in the patient." ALSP's therapeutic approach is to chemically inhibit the enzymes and thereby prevent the pathology.