Arena Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company founded in 1997 and located in San Diego, California. The company has small molecule drugs in development for possible clinical utility in multiple therapeutic areas. The company’s most advanced investigational clinical programs are ralinepag in testing for pulmonary arterial hypertension, etrasimod in evaluation for inflammatory indications and APD371 for the treatment of pain associated with Crohn’s disease. In 2016 the company downsized and shifted its focus to developing new drugs currently being tested in clinical trials.
History
Arena Pharmaceuticals Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company founded in 1997 and located in San Diego, California. Arena focused on discovering drugs that act on G protein-coupled receptors. The company developed technology it called Constitutively Activated Receptor Technology that identified drug leads targeting GPCRs and other classes of receptors to. CART was used to identify drug leads able to act as receptor inhibitors to decrease a biological response or act as receptor activators to increase a biological response.
In January 2000, Arena entered into a collaborative agreement with Fujisawa Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd. to validate up to 13 drug targets.
In May 2000, Arena entered into a research collaboration with Taisho Pharmaceutical Co. focused on several GPCRs selected by Taisho in therapeutic areas of interest.
Products
The company has one drug on the market, Belviq, a weight-loss medication. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved lorcaserin on June 27, 2012. The company committed to a sales force commitment of 200. Lorcaserin is approved for use in adults with a body mass index of 30 or greater, which is considered obese, or adults with a BMI of 27 or greater and who have at least one weight-related health condition, such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol. However, sales of Belviq were disappointing. In 2015 the company laid off 80 workers; this was followed in July 2016 by the layoff of another 100 employees. In January 2017 Arena announced that it is selling Belviq to its Japanese partner, Eisai Co. Ltd., which will manufacture and market the drug; Arena will draw a royalty on global sales. The sale completes a pivot in emphasis toward drugs still under development. Drugs in the company's pipeline includes medications designed to treat pain, ulcerative colitis and pulmonary arterial hypertension., potential products that had not yet been approved by the FDA included Temanogrel, Ralinepag, APD334, APD371, and Nelotanserin. In 2018, Arena's Etrasimod, a drug directed at treating ulcerative colitis, passed phase II clinical trials successfully and moved on to phase III.
