Drugs (e.g. Ketamine) to Lift Depression in Hours Rather Than Weeks

By ANDREA PETERSEN

"The hunt is on for a faster-acting, more effective antidepressant.

Current treatments for depression, including drugs like Prozac and Celexa, often take a month or more to give patients relief—and they don't work for everyone. Now, researchers and several pharmaceutical companies are testing medications that early studies are showing can lift mood in just a few days or even within a couple of hours.


Researchers and drug makers are testing medications that may be able to effectively treat depression within days, or even a couple of hours. WSJ's Andrea Petersen reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty Images.

"You can control seizures and control hypertension within minutes and hours," says Carlos A. Zarate, chief of the experimental therapeutics and pathophysiology branch in the intramural research program at the National Institute of Mental Health and a leading researcher in the search for new antidepressant medications. "That is what we should aim for [with depression]," he says.

Some of the fast-acting treatments being studied, such as ketamine and scopolamine, use existing medications in a new way. Ketamine has been used in higher doses as an anesthetic for decades. Small doses of scopolamine delivered via skin patch are used to treat motion sickness. AstraZeneca AZN.LN +0.16% PLC, the London-based drug company, Naurex Inc., a pharmaceutical firm in Evanston, Ill., and Cerecor Inc., a Baltimore-based biotechnology company, are all developing new drugs for depression that act similarly to ketamine.

It will likely be at least a couple of years before any of the new drugs come to market, since they first need further clinical trials and Food and Drug Administration approval. Some doctors are already using ketamine off label with depressed patients."

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There are Ketamine trials taking place across the country. There are websites that allow you to search for places taking volunteers.