Ax­some shares rock­et up on a sur­prise win for late-stage Alzheimer’s ag­i­ta­tion study — but this is no easy layup

Shares of Ax­some Ther­a­peu­tics $AXSM shot up Mon­day morn­ing on the sur­prise news that its lead drug scored sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant re­sults for Alzheimer’s ag­i­ta­tion, a rel­a­tive­ly green field in drug R&D, in what’s billed as a piv­otal Phase II/III tri­al. But the com­pa­ny will have plen­ty of high-risk work to do be­fore it can ex­pect an FDA ap­proval.

Com­ing off the ropes of a late-stage fail for AXS-05 in treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion, the biotech re­ports that their drug scored well against a place­bo based on a care­giv­er-rat­ed scale of Alzheimer’s pa­tients’ be­hav­ior, which in­cludes track­ing episodes of scream­ing or hit­ting. At week 5 re­searchers tracked mean re­duc­tions from base­line of 15.4 points for AXS-05 and 11.5 points for place­bo, giv­ing them a p val­ue of 0.010.

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