The past decade has been a bad one for antidepressant manufacturers.
Quite apart from all the bad press these drugs have been getting lately, there's been a remarkable lack of new antidepressants making it to the market. The only really novel drugs to hit the shelves since 2000 have been agomelatine and vilazodone. There were a couple of others that were just minor variants on old molecules, but that's it. Quite a contrast from the 1990s when new drugs were ten-a-penny.
This makes "Lu AA21004" rather special. It's a new antidepressant currently in development and by all accounts it's making good progress. It's now in Phase III trials, the last stage before approval. And a large clinical trial has just been published finding that it works.
But is it a medical advance or merely a commercial one?
Pharmacologically, Lu AA21004 is kind of a new twist on an old classic ...
