Raj Mehra, Ph.D., is the Chairman and CEO of Seelos Therapeutics, Inc.
Prior to founding Seelos, Dr. Mehra spent nine years at Auriga USA, LLC as a managing director focused on private and public equity investments in global health care companies. Prior to Auriga, Dr. Mehra was the sector head for health care equity investments at Bennett Lawrence Management, LLC in New York. He also founded and managed a long/short equity hedge fund at Weiss, Peck & Greer LLC.
In this 2,858 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, Dr. Mehra details the stage of his company’s drug developments:
“Our lead program, SLS-002, which is an intranasal ketamine program that’s focused on acute suicide ideation behavior in major depression, which translates to patients who have major depression and also are imminently suicidal, which means they have a suicide plan to implement and coupled behavior that will lead to a successful suicide.
Currently, there are no drug therapeutics that have been approved in the U.S., or worldwide for that matter.
And currently, the number of patients who are showing up in the emergency room that are imminently suicidal is a staggering number, over a million people. And with no approved therapy, this is a high unmet need, and that’s where our lead program is focused on.
And then, we have another program that’s also ready for a potentially pivotal study, SLS-005, which is focused on ALS, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
This disease is also a fatal neurodegenerative disease, which means, for most of the patients, the median survival is three years from the time they are diagnosed with the disease. And in the last 30 years, only one drug was approved four years ago from a small Japanese study, and that drug is used not very widely, and as a result, almost 49,000 patients that are prevalent in the U.S. alone for ALS are in the need of an effective therapy, so we are focused on that as well.”
Dr. Mehra believes that his company’s products will be unaffected by political developments:
“Depending on the election outcome, it is expected that if the Republicans win, then things will continue on as they are, which is generally very positive for the industry. And from the Democrat side, they have started to formulate their policies, which are still not very clear, but the last week they started to formulate the policy that they don’t intend to make any drastic changes in drug pricing.”
Get the complete 2,858 word interview, exclusively in the Wall Street Transcript, with all the details on these exciting new drugs from Dr. Mehra’s company.
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