The US Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent for Sepranolone for the treatment of Tourette, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and pathological gambling. The new patent is valid until 2038. Tourette and OCD are common co-morbidities, both with strong compulsion mechanisms. In March 2021 Asarina Pharma shared new preclinical data from Professor Marco Bortolato, a Scientific Advisory Board member. This confirmed that Sepranolone's effect on both Tourette and OCD symptoms were on a par with approved treatments in compulsivity animal models. The new data confirmed 2019 data from a previous D1CT-7 transgenic mouse model, and presented improved Pre-pulse inhibition (PPI) data in a rat model of TS/OCD. (Significantly reduced PPI is a feature in TS and OCD and a commonly used metric in preclinical psychiatric tests). OCD is a highly prevalent, strongly disruptive condition that affects 1.5% of women and 1.0% of men worldwide. People with OCD have recurring, unwanted thoughts, urges or mental images (obsessions) causing extreme anxiety. These obsessions compel them to do something repetitively to reduce the anxiety (compulsions). The most common OCD treatments are CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) and SSRIs. Whilst SSRIs, are sometimes able to reduce OCD anxiety they fail to treat the compulsive mechanism in OCD and have an overall efficacy of 50%. Asarina Pharma believes that Sepranolone could become the first in line pharmaceutical treatment in Tourette patients for whom CBT has failed, and could also play a key role as a combination treatment with SSRI in OCD. Sepranolone has been developed to treat the millions worldwide who suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders triggered by the potent neurosteroid Allopregnanolone (ALLO). A wide range of preclinical and clinical data have demonstrated that ALLO is a key trigger in conditions from Tourette and OCD to Menstrual Migraine and PMDD, causing a number of disruptive, often personality- or behavior-altering symptoms.