In a first for deuter­at­ed drugs, FDA (fi­nal­ly) OKs Te­va’s would-be Hunt­ing­ton’s block­buster Auste­do

Ten months af­ter the FDA put Te­va’s would-be block­buster deutetra­benazine on hold af­ter rais­ing some sus­pi­cions re­gard­ing cer­tain metabo­lites found in pa­tients, the FDA has giv­en the drug an OK for Hunt­ing­ton’s chorea.

This is a first FDA ap­proval in the world of deuter­at­ed drugs, which tweaks ther­a­pies so that they break down more slow­ly in pa­tients. That way you can use a low­er dose to greater ef­fect. In this case the drug is a small mol­e­cule in­hibitor of vesic­u­lar monoamine 2 trans­porter, or VMAT2, which is de­signed to reg­u­late the lev­els of dopamine in the brain.

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