Magnus Medical Begins SAINT Neuromodulation Trial for Major Depression

Magnus Medical, a company developing brain stimulation tech to treat neuropsychiatric disorders, has treated the first patients in its clinical trial evaluating the Magnus Neuromodulation system with SAINT technology to treat major depressive disorder (MDD).
 
“We are very pleased to announce the start of the OLO clinical trial with SAINT therapy for people with MDD who are ineffectively treated by prior antidepressant medications,” Brandon Bentzley, MD, Ph.D., co-founder and chief scientific officer of Magnus, told the press. “Results from the previous randomized controlled trial were extremely promising—79% of participants experienced relief from their severe depression after receiving SAINT treatment. Given the enormous need for acute care in depression, we knew we needed to make SAINT treatment more widely available while building a body of clinical data.
 
“The OLO trial is the first time the SAINT Neuromodulation System will be studied at multiple sites, allowing a large sample size of adults suffering from clinical depression to access the rapid-acting, personalized treatment for their treatment-resistant major depression,” continued Bentzley.
 
Up to nine clinics nationwide will participate in the study, enrolling up to a thousand adults suffering from a major depressive episode who have not received satisfactory improvement from antidepressant medication in the current episode.
 
Treatment will be delivered at 10 sessions a day, composed of ten-minute treatments of SAINT therapy with 50-minute breaks for five consecutive days.
 
“SAINT therapy is the beginning of a revolution in psychiatry: fast, effective, and personalized treatments that give hope to patients who have failed to receive relief from traditional approaches,” said David Carreon, M.D., a primary investigator and the first to enroll in the OLO study at Acacia Mental Health, Sunnyvale, Calif. “It could profoundly change the way we care for those with treatment-resistant depression and be a model for addressing other conditions as well. Our clinic specializes in caring for the hardest and most hopeless, depressed patients by providing the best treatments available. We have started to enroll participants and are eager to find out whether the overwhelmingly positive results seen at the initial trials at Stanford will translate to our own patients.”
 
“We are delighted to have our first participants enrolled in the OLO study and happy to be working with Magnus to help provide a rapidly acting solution that may solve a fundamental problem in treating pervasive major depression,” said Robert Bota, M.D., a primary investigator in the OLO study at Brain Health Solutions, Costa Mesa, Calif.
 
Earlier this week, Magnus Medical shared results from a clinical trial that show treatment with SAINT Neuromodulation reverses abnormal brain signaling by changing the direction of brain signal flow in people with severe depression.