Lit­tle biotech’s stock flat­lines as its fol­lowup at­tempt at a de­pres­sion drug tri­al win ends in an­oth­er de­feat

You can add one more de­pres­sion drug tri­al to the scrap heap of failed clin­i­cal ex­plo­rations.

Vista­Gen fol­lowed its spring fail­ure for AV-101 as a monother­a­py with a fol­lowup de­feat us­ing the ther­a­py as an ad­junc­tive treat­ment for ma­jor de­pres­sion, adding it to stan­dard drugs among treat­ment-re­sis­tant pa­tients in Phase II.

It didn’t work.

In­ves­ti­ga­tors at the South San Fran­cis­co-based com­pa­ny spec­u­lat­ed that the drug wasn’t mak­ing it across the blood-brain bar­ri­er in large enough con­cen­tra­tions to make a dif­fer­ence. And they tried to fos­ter some hope among in­vestors by cit­ing an­i­mal da­ta in­di­cat­ing that adding it to probenecid could do the trick.

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