On Apr. 1, 2024, Otsuka Pharmaceutica and Click Therapeutics announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had cleared Rejoyn (developed as CT-152), the first prescription digital therapeutic authorized for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) symptoms as an adjunct to clinician-managed outpatient care for adult patients with MDD age 22 years and older who are on antidepressant medication. Rejoyn is intended to reduce MDD symptoms.

Rejoyn is a six-week treatment program designed to help enhance cognitive control of emotion through a combination of clinically-validated cognitive emotional training exercises for the brain and brief therapeutic lessons. Unlike wellness apps, the Rejoyn app is a medical device authorized by the FDA for prescription by a healthcare professional.

The clearance of Rejoyn is based on data from the Mirai study, a 13-week pivotal, multicenter, remote, double-blinded, randomized, controlled trial of 386 participants, aged 22 to 64, diagnosed with MDD who were on antidepressant medication for the treatment of depression. In the trial, patients were randomized to receive either Rejoyn or a sham control app. Individuals treated with Rejoyn showed an improvement in depression symptom severity from baseline.

Symptom improvement was consistently observed across multiple patient and clinician-reported scales, including the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), Patient Health Questionnaire nine-item depression scale (PHQ-9), and the Clinical Global Impression – Severity scale (CGI-S). One month after completing the six-week treatment program, participants in the Rejoyn group showed continued improvement. No side effects were assessed as related to Rejoyn during the trial. Full clinical data may be found as part of the Clinician Brief Summary.

Rejoyn offers a novel approach to the treatment of depression symptoms as it is designed to target neural networks affected by depression and is hypothesized to leverage the brain’s inherent neuroplasticity to alter those connections leading to symptom reduction over time. Clinical research has long shown that chemical imbalances are not the only cause of depression, though most common treatments target these neurochemical abnormalities. For some people with depression, the parts of the brain responsible for emotion recognition and processing and the parts responsible for cognition do not communicate properly, making emotional regulation more difficult.