A new biotech has sprung out of stealth with a bold vision to develop the “greatest therapeutic of all time”—a drug that can quickly sober up people who have had too much to drink.
Goa Therapeutics officially launched today with $15.5 million in funding, raised primarily from individual industry leaders, and has already filed for an initial public offering that could net as much as $75 million more.
The company plans to file an investigational new drug application for its lead asset, GOA26, by the end of the year, striving for a phase 1 trial to follow in 2027. The initial focus of a therapy that can help the body quickly metabolize alcohol will be narrow: to clear the way for emergency departments to safely and promptly operate on patients with traumatic injuries who arrive with high blood alcohol content (BAC). But Goa’s ultimate goal reaches much further.
“The grand vision is over the counter, non-prescription, and to make this as widely available as Narcan,” Andrew Altschuler, Goa’s CEO, told Fierce. “The vision is to get this thing in every bar, every restaurant, every vending machine, every corner store, everywhere alcohol is sold. To get this into your pocket, into your glove box, into your purse, have it at home.”
The overall potential market size, Altschuler said, is “immeasurably huge.”
Goa got its start when its chief scientist, Tami Ehrmann Barr, M.D., Ph.D., was a postdoctoral researcher studying protein engineering at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. Barr was forever changed after experiencing an emergency room during Oktoberfest.
“She witnessed this horrific scene because today's standard of care is strictly supportive,” Altschuler told Fierce. Patients who come in with too much alcohol in their system are given fluids and monitored until their body naturally breaks the toxin down. That wait time can have a negative impact if patients need additional medical interventions.
“Upwards of 50% of the patients that present to the trauma center or to the ER with severe bodily injury are intoxicated,” he told Fierce. Because alcohol “messes with every physiological function in the body,” this can prove troublesome for surgeons who need to act fast to save a patient’s life or limb.
Barr began tinkering with the enzymes responsible for naturally breaking down alcohol, known as alcohol dehydrogenases, using her protein engineering expertise. Altschuler met the scientist in 2019 and provided further funding for her work, leading to Goa’s formation in 2024.
The pivotal moment that led to Goa came after a test in rats. The rodents were fed an absurd amount of alcohol, the equivalent of a 200-pound man downing about 13 shots of vodka. After treatment with the first generation of Barr’s tinkered proteins, Altschuler said all the alcohol was cleared from the animals’ bloodstreams in five minutes.
“We achieved a 100% reduction in blood-alcohol content,” the CEO said. “Below the level of quantification.”
Today, alongside its official launch from stealth, Goa is following up with new data on pigs at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma and Clinical Congress of Acute Care Surgery in Dallas.
Unlike the rats, the pigs were anesthetized before their drinking binge—nobody wants to mess with a belligerent, drunken pig, Altschuler said—and then treated with GOA26 90 minutes later.
Twenty minutes after treatment, the BAC of the swine had dropped by an average of 61.3% compared to control, Goa announced.
GOA26 is designed to mimic the body’s natural alcohol digestion, but on a much larger scale.
“The body is really just designed to deal with minuscule amounts of alcohol that are produced in the digestive system through the fermentation of sugars,” Altschuler explained. This is why our natural dehydrogenases are only found in the liver.
GOA26 uses an engineered dehydrogenase that is stable outside the liver and “1000 times more efficacious than the enzymes that exist naturally,” he said. But it doesn’t make sense to stop there—breaking down ethanol produces acetaldehyde, which is the metabolite of alcohol that actually produces toxic effects.
“Our second active ingredient sequesters the acetaldehyde,” Altschuler said. “Acetaldehyde is what causes all the bad things—the cancers and the liver cirrhosis and psychosis and neurodegenerative diseases.”
Though Goa has big plans for its lead asset and the pipeline following behind it, Altschuler said that even the drug’s planned first indication is marked by massive unmet need. “Our drug, if and when approved, will be a game changer in the trauma center,” Altschuler said.