Dr. Vimal Mehta is CEO and Co-Founder of BioXcel Therapeutics, Inc. He has over two decades of experience in the pharma and biotech industry.
He also has been Senior Vice President of Business Development at Inpharmatica Ltd. and Jubilant Life Sciences. In addition, he was Business Development Manager at CuraGen Corporation.
Dr. Mehta holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Delhi, India, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in chemistry at the University of Montpellier, France.
In this 3,086 word interview, exclusive to the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Mehta details his strategy for his company.
“…We are focusing on agitation resulting from neuropsychiatric conditions in patients, like schizophrenia, bipolar, Alzheimer’s, dementia, opioid withdrawal and hyperactive delirium.
Recently, we got a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, which is related to treating ASUD, which is alcohol and substance use disorder. So there are multiple diseases for which you can have this agitation and the patient needs to calm down.
Our drug, 501, works through a central mechanism in the brain. There is a firing of norepinephrine, a chemical that results in agitation. And our drug can stop the release of norepinephrine.
So we believe that it can work across multiple disease pathophysiologies and multiple disease conditions. And we have designed the drug…”
Dr. Mehta has near term milestones that he seeks to achieve:
“…We are transitioning the drug to Phase III, subject to discussions with the FDA. We expect to open our trial in Q4 of 2019.
So that’s where we are with that product. And the underlying drug that is being used on the film has been in the market for 20 years.
So our innovation was we identified that microdosing can be used to treat agitation, and the current drug is used as a sedative anesthetic.
It has never been used for agitation, and it comes in a bottle, so it’s given as an IV drug. We took that drug and converted into a sublingual thin film. We have a novel new indication as well as microdosing, small doses that we are using, and it’s a sublingual thin film.
There’s a lot of safety established around the IV form of the drug with millions of people, like 10 million or so. And in our studies, the sublingual thin film in hundreds of patients.
So that’s a kind of plan for 501. Phase III study, pivotal Phase III study is expected to start this year…”
Get the entire picture from Dr. Mehta in this exclusive 3,086 word interview in the Wall Street Transcript.
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