Science That Will Change The World, 2024 Edition
A retrospective on findings that I think will prove to be a big deal
2024 has been a year… but that will soon be over. On average, the time between the publication of a scientific finding in biomedical science and large-scale adoption is about 17 years. That is too long! We have some science published in 2024 that I think will make a huge impact in the future, and I will highlight a few findings here so that we can make noise about these findings and speed up that broader awareness! These are presented in no particular order.
“LSD” for Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Mind Medicine, Inc. wrapped up a phase 2b trial for the use of MM-120 (their proprietary version of LSD for Generalized Anxiety Disorder) in 2024. This is a remarkable treatment option, not just in degree but in kind. With no fancy additional therapy, the results published thus far include:
Clinical response rate of 78% in 100 µg and 200 µg dose groups and 50% clinical remission rate in the 100 µg dose group at Week 4.
They have already dosed the first patient in phase 3. More data is forthcoming, but a single-dose treatment for GAD is a huge deal. Of course, this is industry-funded work; thus, skepticism is warranted until we have larger samples in the real world. My disclosures: I have worked with this team and have <1000 company shares.
TMS is Empirically A More Cost-Effective Treatment Than Drugs
I know what you are thinking—cost-effectiveness isn’t sexy research! Except, in my world, it is. A Dutch team did a randomized controlled trial1—published all of 4 days ago—in which:
An economic evaluation with 12 months follow-up was conducted in the Dutch care setting as part of a pragmatic multicenter randomized controlled trial, in which patients with treatment-resistant depression were randomized to treatment with rTMS or treatment with the next pharmacological step according to the treatment algorithm
And found… (for general audiences, QALYs are “Quality Adjusted Life Years,” a measure of cost-effectiveness in healthcare in one unit. Another is the ICER, or incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER), another cost-effectiveness unit).
Higher QALYs, response, and remission rates were found for lower costs when comparing the rTMS group to the medication group. After 12 months, QALYs were 0.618 in the rTMS group and 0.545 in the medication group. The response was 27.1% and 24.4% and remission was 25.0% and 17.1%, respectively. Incremental costs for rTMS were −€2.280, resulting in a dominant ICUR for QALYs and ICER for response and remission..
This was done in Europe, so it’s in Euros. What is so exciting here? This is randomized controlled trial data to infer causality, not just correlation. So, for this guy who’s been writing a newsletter about a theoretically cost-effective treatment (as demonstrated in a bunch of correlational and not causal data), this is the big deal of big deals. It’s also validating to see large-scale, well-designed, randomized trials done to answer cost-effectiveness questions like they were really worthy of the same kind of science we usually reserve for drug discovery and basic science.
I’ve written prior articles about this in different populations, such as Medicaid. This will make it—I hope—much harder for health plans to deny this care.