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Cheryl Meier had watched clinical trial enrollment announcements for years — but always for her sons’ type 1 diabetes, never for herself. Her OB-GYN had put her on Effexor for her depression 20 years ago, and it worked well enough — she could sleep for the first time in her life, and she no longer cried at every little thing. But it never worked for her dark thoughts.

But then she retired, and then she had time, and then she saw an email — “I guess once your name gets on a list, it’s there,” she said — for an experimental depression drug called zuranolone.

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Unlike today’s crowded market of SSRIs, prescribed once and taken for months, years, or even indefinitely, zuranolone, developed by Sage Therapeutics, promises something different.

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