On 5 April, Sage Therapeutics, a biopharmaceutical company leading the way to create a world with better brain health, presented findings from its LUMINARY Phase II clinical trial in a talk at the American Academy of Neurology’s 74th Annual Meeting, held in Seattle. The LUMINARY study is an open-label study evaluating the safety, tolerability and efficacy of SAGE-718 in people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). 26 participants, aged 50 to 80 years old, received an oral tablet of SAGE-718 once daily during two weeks. The study’s primary goal was to determine the treatment’s safety. In the trial, SAGE-718 was found to be well-tolerated with no serious adverse events. Various tests were used to assess multiple domains of cognitive performance in participants. At Day 14, improvements were observed from the study’s start on multiple tests of executive functioning, namely Digit Symbol Substitution, Multitasking, One Touch Stockings, Spatial Working Memory, and 2-Back tests. In addition, improvements were observed in tests of learning and memory, namely Pattern Recognition Memory and Verbal Recognition Memory tests. The company also reported a statistically significant increase of 2.3 points over a month from the study’s start in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA).
