Sage, Bio­gen tout an­oth­er PhI­II win for de­pres­sion pill, but dura­bil­i­ty con­cerns again cloud the drug's fu­ture

Sage Ther­a­peu­tics has put to­geth­er a con­stel­la­tion of piv­otal stud­ies ex­am­in­ing dif­fer­ent ways for how its ex­per­i­men­tal de­pres­sion drug could im­pact pa­tients’ symp­toms. Ear­ly Wednes­day morn­ing, the Bio­gen-part­nered biotech re­vealed its lat­est Phase III read­out that ap­peared to both reaf­firm its hy­poth­e­sis and its skep­tics’ con­cerns.

In a tri­al look­ing at how the drug, known as zu­ra­nolone, might in­duce rapid symp­tom al­le­vi­a­tion when start­ed at the same time as an SS­RI, Sage found a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in how a de­pres­sion rat­ing scale changed on av­er­age be­tween the ac­tive and place­bo arms af­ter three days. Sage has as­sert­ed this could al­ter the par­a­digm of the de­pres­sion treat­ment land­scape as SS­RIs gen­er­al­ly take be­tween four to eight weeks to kick in.

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