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Colorado Clinics Collaborate to Transform Treatment for Trauma, Depression, and Anxiety By partnering with high-quality providers like Propagate Hope, we can connect more people to holistic, transformative care beyond just meds and support Colorado’s mental health providers to thrive.” — Liesl Perez DENVER, CO, UNITED STATES, December 8, 2025 / EINPresswire.com / -- Axis Integrated Mental Health announced a strategic partnership with Propagate Hope Counseling designed to expand access to Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy while helping smaller therapy practices better support patients who may be unaware of cutting-edge, insurance-covered mental health treatment options. Through this collaboration, more Colorado patients will gain access to effective, evidence-based trauma therapy while also benefiting from increased awareness of advanced treatments such as Deep TMS and Spravato – therapies that are often covered by insurance but remain underutilized due to a lack of provider infrastructure, education, and coordination. “Colorado’s mental health crisis has only gotten worse in the last year, with adult mental health ranking #48 of all states,” said Liesl Perez, co-founder of Axis Integrated Mental Health. “By partnering with high-quality providers like Propagate Hope, we can connect more people to holistic, transformative care beyond just meds and support Colorado’s mental health providers to thrive.” The partnership enables Propagate Hope to stay focused on trauma-informed healing while giving their patients streamlined access to award-winning, locally owned and operated psychiatric care, medication management, Deep TMS, Spravato, and insurance navigation. At the same time, Propagate Hope gains access to operational and clinical infrastructure that would be difficult or expensive to build independently. “Many clients don’t realize treatments like Deep TMS or Spravato, which boast as much as an 82% efficacy rate, exist or that their insurance covers them,” said Tim Kelly of Propagate Hope Counseling. “Axis Integrated Mental Health’s neuroplasticity-building treatments can make it much easier for clients to heal in combination with IFS therapy.” This collaboration directly supports Axis Integrated Mental Health’s 266K Project, a mission to prevent the estimated 266,000 Coloradans experiencing serious thoughts of suicide from dying by improving statewide access to effective, coordinated care. Rather than growing solely through its own practice, Axis is focused on strengthening independent clinics by sharing marketing and operational knowledge, referring patients, and providing support for advanced treatments when needed. “Saving lives at scale doesn’t happen by building a single large clinic,” added Liesl Perez. “The only way we can achieve our goal to reduce the number of people with serious thoughts of suicide in Colorado is to enable hundreds of smaller clinics to reach more people. This is challenging in a state that spends less than other states on mental health, with insurance companies that aren’t being held accountable, and a shortage of providers to serve the need.” As part of this broader mission, Axis is actively sharing its operational and marketing playbooks with partner clinics, including guidance on insurance optimization, patient education, prior authorizations, care coordination, and ethical patient acquisition strategies. These same learnings will be shared publicly through the Practice Power Workshop taking place on January 17, where mental health practice owners will receive hands-on training from marketing, HR, and billing specialists to help them grow sustainably, operate efficiently, and expand access to advanced, covered treatments. “This partnership is one example of the ecosystem we’re building,” said Liesl Perez. “We want everyone who can help people feel better, from primary care physicians to business coaches, to connect to more people, and we’re willing to share the trade secrets that made us the best mental health clinic in Denver and Boulder with everyone.” About Propagate Hope Counseling Propagate Hope Counseling is a Colorado-based therapy practice specializing in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy and trauma-informed care for depression, anxiety, and complex PTSD. Their clinicians are trained in parts work and non-pathologizing therapeutic approaches designed to help clients build self-compassion and long-term healing. Through partnership with Axis, Propagate Hope clients now benefit from coordinated access to psychiatric care and advanced, insurance-covered treatment options while maintaining continuity of trauma-focused therapy. Learn more at propagatehopecounseling.com. About Axis Integrated Mental Health Axis Integrated Mental Health is an award-winning Colorado-based mental health organization providing integrated psychiatry, therapy, and advanced treatments including Deep TMS and Spravato. Founded in 2019, Axis operates across Aurora, Boulder, Westminster, and Denver Tech Center and has underwritten more than $400,000 in pro bono care. Axis is the creator of the 266K Project, a statewide mission to prevent suicide by expanding access, strengthening clinics, and improving patient awareness of effective mental health treatment. Learn more or register for the Practice Power Workshop at axismh.com. Schedule Your Integrated Care Plan Today If you or a loved one is struggling with depression, anxiety, treatment-resistant conditions, or complex trauma, coordinated care combining IFS therapy, Deep TMS, Spravato, and psychiatric expertise is now accessible across Denver, Boulder, Westminster, Aurora, and the Denver Tech Center. To schedule a consultation or learn more about integrated care plans, visit axismh.com or call (720) 400-7025 For partnership inquiries, contact: info@axismh.com Liesl Perez Axis Integrated Mental Health +1 415-203-7179 info@axismh.com Visit us on social media: LinkedIn Instagram Facebook YouTube Other Legal Disclaimer: EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. 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iStock, BlackSalmon The R&D pipeline for depression therapies faced a demoralizing 2025 as five high-pro including KOR antagonists by Johnson & Johnson and Neumora Therapeutics, flunked late-stage clinical trials, underscoring the persistent challenges of CNS drug development. The pipeline of investigational depression treatments has had a difficult year. It often seems the only news coming out of this space is bad news, with potential therapies being abandoned and endpoints missed . Even Johnson & Johnson, which aims to become the number one company in neuroscience by 2030, axed a Phase III trial in major depressive disorder. The reality is that developing treatments targeting the central nervous system (CNS) is challenging, and drug candidates often come off the rails when moving into mid-to-late-stage trials. There is an estimated 85% failure rate of CNS drugs in Phase II and III trials, according to WCG Clinical Services. Between 2009 and 2025 , the FDA approved just 15 medications for depressive disorders, despite major depression affecting more than 8% of the U.S. population each year. But the market potential for successful candidates is so great that companies keep trying, Myles Minter, partner at William Blair, told BioSpace . “You’ve got 21 million patients in the U.S. and around 50% of them get treated,” he said. “But, of these, there are 8 million that really don’t respond after several lines of therapy, including all the relapses.” There are several reasons for this, Minter explained, including side effects, lack of efficacy and time to efficacy—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) take around six weeks to work and even then, only work half the time. “Hence, the unmet need.” Minter said there are various hurdles to successful clinical development, but the major barrier is placebo response. Due to the naturally subjective endpoints in depression trials, which rely on the patients’ self-reported outcomes, there is a higher likelihood of patients in the placebo cohort reporting improvements, he explained. This was the key factor that led J&J to discontinue development of aticaprant in March, as the kappa opioid receptor (KOR) blocker was unable to show greater efficacy than placebo in major depressive disorder (MDD). For Minter, this was the most significant trial failure in recent years, representing a major blow to the KOR antagonist class. Here, BioSpace takes a closer look at this development and four more trial failures that rocked the depression space in 2025. Johnson & Johnson’s Aticaprant It’s been an especially rough year for the KOR antagonist class, cemented by the Phase III failure of J&J’s aticaprant. The KOR antagonist class in depression emerged from the National Institutes of Health, which had been searching for signals relating to brain reward circuitry. KOR antagonists surfaced as a potential therapeutic approach for depression after showing potential in preclinical studies. This promise led J&J, as well as other companies—including Neumora Therapeutics—to pursue the development of KOR assets for MDD. J&J, for its part, took aticaprant as far as Phase III trials as an adjunct therapy for MDD with anhedonia—the inability to experience joy—before abandoning the program in March due to “insufficient efficacy in the target patient population.” Prior to the readout, expectations were very high for this drug class, Minter said. Now, those expectations “are absolutely rock bottom.” Neumora’s Navacaprant J&J’s KOR disappointment may have been presaged in January, when Neumora announced that the first of its Phase III trials for its KOR antagonist navacaprant in MDD failed to show statistically significant improvement over placebo. Unlike J&J, however, the company elected not to discontinue development in MDD, but did make adjustments to two ongoing Phase III studies, KOASTAL-2 and KOASTAL-3 . The adjustment involved reducing the number of sites used, adding medical monitoring, and implementing a screening tool to prevent people enrolled in multiple clinical trials at once from participating in the KOASTAL studies. The results from these ongoing studies are expected to read out in 2026. “We believe these changes strengthen the studies and look forward to delivering topline data in 2026,” Neumora CEO Paul Berns said during the company’s fourth-quarter 2024 business update in March. Minter noted that site variability and trial execution have been major issues facing the broader depression drug development space, as the diverse conduct of clinical trial sites adds to the heterogeneity of results. KOASTAL-2 has a primary completion date of May 2026, while KOASTAL-3 is expected to read out in February. Alto’s ALTO-203 Another asset that failed to meet expectations was Alto Neuroscience’s ALTO-203. The oral H3 receptor blocker was unable to significantly improve mood in patients with MDD, Alto reported in June. However, as the trial was considered exploratory and proof-of-concept, the biotech pointed to other treatment outcomes that could validate further development, such as reported improvements to sustained attention and wakefulness. The news emerged less than a year after Alto’s other depression asset, ALTO-100, which targets the BDNF protein, also failed to improve symptoms in MDD compared to placebo in a mid-stage trial. One of the compounding factors for these trial issues, according to Minter, could be patient adherence to the treatments. In ALTO-100’s Phase IIb trial, upwards of 30% of patients assigned to take the study drug failed to do so, he said. This marks one of the challenges broadly for depression trials, Minter noted. “It’s very different from oncology trials, where they’re coming in for an infusion or a scan, as the patients are going to be 100% compliant, unless adverse events put them off therapy.” Supernus’ SPN-820 Another contender, Supernus Pharmaceuticals, took a different approach with an oral activator of the mTORC protein. The outcome was the same, however—a Phase IIb trial for SPN-820 in February failed to meet its primary endpoint in treatment-resistant depression (TRD). The asset failed to show a statistically significant difference in the reduction of depressive symptoms compared to placebo, according to Supernus’ press release at the time. The secondary endpoint, which sought a treatment difference between SPN-820 and placebo from baseline to week four of the trial, was also missed. Supernus might have expected better, as the trial followed a positive Phase IIa readout in MDD in October 2024. However, Jefferies analysts at the time cautioned that drugs that could work for both major depressive disorder and TRD are “rare.” As for SPN-820’s future in TRD, Supernus CEO Jack Khattar said in a statement alongside the February press release that the company would “continue to analyze these data” with development partner Navitor Pharmaceuticals. In its third-quarter report , the company confirmed plans to initiate a follow-on Phase IIb trial for SPN-820 in MDD, with no mention of further trials in TRD. Neurocrine’s NBI-770 Last month, Neurocrine Biosciences became the latest company to run into trouble at the Phase II mark with NBI-1070770, also known as simply ‘770. The drug, a negative allosteric modulator of the NMDA NR2B receptor in development for MDD, failed to significantly improve depression severity, missing the study’s primary endpoint. Neurocrine CMO Sanjay Keswani said in the company’s press release that there are “aspects of the data that warrant further exploration,” and that Neurocrine will assess these before determining next steps. NBI-1070770’s failure to show efficacy came as something of a surprise to analysts, with BMO Capital Markets noting that it had a similar mechanism of action to J&J’s esketamine TRD treatment Spravato, first approved in 2019. The FDA has also approved Axsome Therapeutics’ oral NMDA receptor antagonist for MDD. With this treatment precedent set, BMO analysts said the asset was viewed as “somewhat derisked.” For all the challenges drug developers have faced in the depression space in 2025, Minter stressed that significant steps are being made by the treatments that do make it across the regulatory finish line. Of Spravato, he said, “Most people say the product is literally a lifesaver because you don’t know when that patient is coming back. If you can’t treat a depressive episode, then that may be the last time you see them.”