Hepion Pharmaceuticals believes that the challenge of developing treatments for NASH and other chronic liver diseases is best met by developing drug compounds with the properties described below. This strategy is being employed with the development of Rencofilstat.
Pleiotropic Drug Actions
Our drug candidate is intended to target multiple molecular pathways across the full spectrum of liver disease progression, from the triggering events that initiate disease to the pathological events that directly impair liver function and integrity.
Optimal treatment of chronic liver diseases – halting progression and stimulating repair – requires intervention at multiple steps in the disease process. The traditional approach is to combine several drugs with discrete mechanisms of action, which carries a risk of drug-drug interactions, cumulative drug side effects, and lengthy development times with multiple therapeutic agents. Hepion believes that a safer and more efficient approach is to alleviate multiple disease pathways with single drug compounds having multiple therapeutic actions.
Superior Safety Profile with Minimal Side Effects
Developing entirely novel drug entities carries significant risk of unexpected and serious side effects. Hepion’s approach of chemically creating new drugs based on pre-existing known drug scaffolding with long histories of clinical usage significantly reduces the risk of unanticipated side effects and other problems throughout development.
Targets the Liver
Maximizing the amount of drug at its intended site of action maximizes drug efficacy and minimizes the risk of side effects arising from off-target effects in other organs (i.e., enhancing hepatic first-pass extraction)