ABOVE: © istock.com, martin barraud
As droughts go, the one plaguing the antidepressant drug development landscape for the past few decades has been noteworthy. Since the advent of serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors in the 1980s and 1990s, there has been a dearth of new pharmacological therapies for mood disorders, says psychiatrist Samantha Meltzer-Brody, director of the University of North Carolina’s Perinatal Psychiatry Program. “The same medications largely that were there when I went to medical school a long time ago were still the ones we’ve been using.”
Given this state of affairs, Meltzer-Brody says she had the “most modest” of expectations a few years ago when she got involved in the first clinical trial testing a new drug, SAGE-547, for postpartum depression. Developed by Massachusetts-based Sage Therapeutics, SAGE-547 is a solution of allopregnanolone, a neuroactive metabolite of the sex hormone progesterone, which plays key roles in the female reproductive ...
