The clinical stage neuroscience company, which launched in 2021 with about $500 million from Arch Venture Partners, is shrinking to extend its cash runway into the third quarter of 2027 and pivoting to three earlier stage programs in Alzheimer's agitation, schizophrenia, and…
Neumora Therapeutics is pulling the plug on navacaprant, its lead experimental depression drug, and cutting roughly 35% of its workforce after the therapy failed to beat placebo in three late-stage trials. The decision turns the page on a once-$500 million neuroscience bet and leaves the company smaller, earlier-stage, and pointed at a different set of bets in Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and obesity.
The drug, a kappa opioid receptor antagonist called navacaprant, was supposed to do what decades of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors have not: deliver rapid, meaningful relief for patients with major depressive disorder. Instead, according to Fierce Biotech's reporting on Neumora's June 15, 2026 press release, all three Phase 3 studies missed their primary endpoint. That includes the original Koastal-1 trial reported in early 2025, plus the Koastal-2 and Koastal-3 studies announced Monday. The primary measure was the change in Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) score at six weeks. In Koastal-3, the placebo arm actually scored better than the drug on that measure.
That makes navacaprant the latest casualty in a wider pattern. Kappa opioid receptor antagonists, a class that includes aticaprant (formerly CERC-501) and earlier compounds, have repeatedly failed to clear the bar in MDD, suggesting the biology may not be the right target for this disease even when individual programs look promising in Phase 2.
Neumora is responding with discipline rather than desperation. The 35% workforce reduction is sized to save about $10 million a year and extend the company's cash runway into the third quarter of 2027. That window is long enough to hit readouts from the three programs Neumora is choosing to keep: NMRA-511, a V1a receptor antagonist in Alzheimer's disease agitation; NMRA-898, an M4 positive allosteric modulator in schizophrenia; and NMRA-215, an NLRP3 inhibitor in obesity.
Each of those is a fundamentally different mechanism from navacaprant, and each is earlier in development. The next round of readouts, not Monday's announcement, is the real test of whether the pivot is grounded in genuine scientific optionality or just survival math.
The market is not waiting to find out. Neumora's stock fell roughly 45% in premarket trading Monday and is now down about 95% from its early-2025 peak, the high it hit before the original Koastal-1 flop. The question for the next twelve months is whether the three remaining programs can carry the company through that runway, or whether Neumora ends up running the same triage exercise again.