Al­ler­gan dou­bles down on NM­DA de­pres­sion drug de­vel­op­ment ef­forts, bag­ging an op­tion to a small mol­e­cule fol­lowup drug

Close to three years af­ter Al­ler­gan $AGN swooped in to buy Nau­rex and its NM­DA drug for de­pres­sion for $560 mil­lion in cash, help­ing spin out the orig­i­nal team in­to a new biotech dubbed Aptinyx, the two have fol­lowed up with an op­tion deal on a small mol­e­cule fol­low-up pro­gram.

Al­ler­gan has so far clear­ly en­joyed its late-stage work on ra­pastinel, an IV drug which the FDA des­ig­nat­ed a break­through ther­a­py for ma­jor de­pres­sion. NM­DA has been a tar­get for years in the R&D crowd fo­cused on de­pres­sion, and Aptinyx CEO Nor­bert Riedel has steered a course to prov­ing that his re­searchers found the ther­a­peu­tic strat­e­gy for get­ting it right.

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