Dallas, Texas 02/05/2014 (FINANCIALSTRENDS) – The $378 million market capped Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:VNDA) announced on 31st January that it had got Food and Drug Administration’s approval for its drug candidate Hetlioz which is designed to help blind patients regulate and streamline their sleep patterns. The drug which also goes by the name of tasimelteon, has been found to offer relief to totally blind people who are traumatized by 24 hour non-sleep disorder by regulating their body clocks. Few blind patients are associated with disrupted night time sleep patterns which causes excessive daytime sleepiness. The approved drug is expected to help such patients alleviate these disruptive patterns.
Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:VNDA) expects that in the U.S close to 90,000 patients suffer from such sleep disorders and has estimated that it would be able to earn $295 million as revenue from the sale of this medicine by 2018.
The drug tasimelteon works on increasing the secretion of a naturally produced hormone called Melatonin by the pineal gland, which in turns plays a major role in the maintenance of the internal body clock in humans. By consuming the same before retiring for the night, the drug helps generation of the melatonin in the body of the patient, which in turn will reset the body clock, which is otherwise reset by light in non blind individuals.
Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. (NASDAQ:VNDA) claims that tasimelteon ( which is administered in the form of Hetloiz capsule) is the only drug which has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug administration for treatment of sleep deprivation in blind people. With the go ahead by the regulators, the drug company has indicated that it would be working towards commercially launching this drug in the second quarter of 2014.
The drug firm has also disclosed that the most common side effects of consuming this medication includes “headache, nightmares and respiratory and urinary tract infections in addition to symptoms like drowsiness”.