Santa Monica, California-based GOA Therapeutics Corporation has emerged from stealth with USD 15.5 million in cumulative funding and disclosed its lead drug candidate, GOA26, an investigational intravenous treatment for acute alcohol intoxication and poisoning — a condition for which no US FDA-approved pharmacological intervention currently exists.
The program is targeting a treatment gap that has remained largely untouched by drug development. Patients presenting with severe alcohol intoxication are generally managed with supportive care while ethanol is metabolized naturally, with treatment focused on complications such as impaired consciousness, respiratory depression, aspiration, dehydration, and trauma. No US FDA-approved therapy is currently available to directly accelerate ethanol clearance.
GOA26 is designed to address this by combining an engineered enzyme that speeds ethanol metabolism with a chemical scavenger that binds acetaldehyde, the toxic metabolite produced as alcohol is broken down. The dual approach is intended to lower blood alcohol concentrations rapidly without allowing acetaldehyde to accumulate.
In IND-enabling studies in pigs, GOA said animals treated with GOA26 had blood alcohol concentrations 61.3% lower than untreated controls 20 minutes after administration following an oral ethanol challenge. The data were presented at the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma in Dallas.