Altay Therapeutics (Founding)

Founding Year: 2020
Company Description: Altay develops small molecule drugs to treat chronic liver diseases like liver fibrosis and liver cancer. Our co-founder Dr. Osman Ozes, led the first drug development program for Esbriet (Pirfenidone), resulting in the first FDA approved therapy for lung fibrosis. Esbriet is now a $1 billion/year drug and has already made over $6 billion in revenue. With a team that has over 70+ years of small molecule drug development experience, we intend to do the same with chronic liver diseases, which affects over 20 million Americans and represents a market size of over $30 billion. We know we are well positioned for success because we have shown excellent pre-clinical mouse data in several liver fibrosis models using our novel small molecule. We demonstrate a reduction in fibrosis with our drug, but more significantly, we show a reversal in fibrotic tissue back to normal tissue. With our current developmental strategy, we hope to have a clinic-ready compound by the end of 2021 and be in phase I clinical trials by mid of 2022.
Market: Healthcare
Coinvestors: YCombinator