Mi­cro­cap biotech Vista­Gen turned to pen­ny­s­tock af­ter PhII re­sults show its de­pres­sion drug does­n't work so­lo

Vista­Gen Ther­a­peu­tics’ AV-101 has flunked an ex­plorato­ry Phase II, quash­ing hopes that the drug could work as a monother­a­py for treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion.

To be sure, these are tough to treat pa­tients: On av­er­age the 19 pa­tients en­rolled in the study had tried 7.8 dif­fer­ent an­ti­de­pres­sants over their life­time to treat their TRD, which has last­ed an av­er­age of 8.6 years.

Af­ter wan­ing these pa­tients off their an­ti­de­pres­sants, in­ves­ti­ga­tors ad­min­is­tered ei­ther AV-101 or place­bo for 14 days, then fol­low­ing a wash out pe­ri­od swapped the drug and place­bo arms. At the end, the drug did not in­duce a sig­nif­i­cant change from base­line in the Hamil­ton De­pres­sion Rat­ing Scale — the pri­ma­ry end­point.

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