The World Orphan Drug Alliance (WODA), a global alliance of commercial distributors dedicated to providing access to treatments for rare diseases and specialty medicines in complex markets around the world, has expanded its reach to include Japan and South Korea, as well as the African subcontinent.

The addition of two new members, Nxera Pharma (formerly Sosei Heptares) and Veld Pharmaceuticals, brings the total number of countries covered by WODA to 156 and provides access to 200 million rare disease patients.

This expansion is an important step towards WODA's goal of providing access to rare disease treatments to patients worldwide. 

The Japan and South Korean region will be covered by Nxera Pharma, a technology enabled biopharma company with world-class drug design capabilities and highly experienced clinical development and commercialisation teams in the territories.

In addition to several products already being commercialised in Japan, Nxera Pharma is focused on accelerating the development of life-changing medicines by investing in science and technology. It has an extensive portfolio of over 30 active in-house and partnered programmes advancing from discovery through to late clinical stage with multiple leading pharma and biotech companies.

The Alliance now provides a broad outreach with a local focus through 12 separate entities: Specialised Therapeutics (Australia, New Zealand, and South East Asia), Medis (Central and Eastern Europe & Nordics), RareStone (Greater China), Path Pharma (Greece, Cyprus, Malta), CTS (Israel), OrphanDC (Latin America), Vector Pharma (Middle East, North Africa, and Turkey), Orpharm (Russia and the CIS region), EffRX Pharmaceuticals (Switzerland), Veld Pharmaceuticals (the African subcontinent), Nxera Pharma (Japan, South Korea), and its global consultancy partner Decisive Consulting.