Minerva rockets on positive mid-stage trial with MIN-101

Clinical stage biotech firm Minerva Neurosciences (Nasdaq: NERV) saw its shares sky-rocket as much as 183% to $10.03 in heavy volume this morning, after the company released strong mid-stage results with it schizophrenia drug candidate.

Minerva announced positive top line results from a prospective Phase IIb, 12-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled parallel clinical trial evaluating the efficacy, safety and tolerability of MIN-101 in patients with negative symptoms of schizophrenia.  These negative symptoms, for which no approved treatment is currently available, affect the majority of schizophrenic patients and can persist over their lifetimes, the company noted.

The study successfully achieved its primary endpoint, demonstrating the statistically-significant benefit of MIN-101 over placebo in improving negative symptoms as measured by the pentagonal structure model (PSM) of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The effect was shown for both doses tested: 32mg: p ≤ 0.022 with an effect size of 0.45, and 64mg: p ≤ 0.003 with effect size of 0.58.