Tens of millions of Americans stay on antidepressants and benzodiazepines for years — not because they still need them, but because medicine built an on-ramp to these drugs and never built the exit. The system rests on a misbelief: that if you feel terrible when you stop an antidepressant, that proves you still need it. For decades, patients and physicians alike have read discontinuation symptoms as the illness returning — and restarted the drug. The science now distinguishes the two. Withdrawal is a physiological event with its own diagnostic criteria: it follows dose reductions, includes symptoms the patient never had before, and resolves differently than relapse. That confusion is not a footnote — it is the trap.
We reject the assumption that tapering is simple — just take less. Pharmacology says otherwise: because of how these drugs bind receptors, the final small doses matter most, and the reductions required at the end are far smaller than the smallest tablet made. Today, medicine tells patients to split pills and count beads out of capsules. We believe that coming off a dependence-forming medication safely is not a willpower problem or a character test. It is an engineering and infrastructure problem — and one we know how to solve. Starting takes a fifteen-minute appointment; stopping can take years. Closing that asymmetry is Extalvo’s founding insight.
Today, coming off a dependence-forming medication means improvising. Patients rely on compounded liquids, tapering strips, and split pills — none of them FDA-approved, and most of them not covered by insurance. So people pay out of pocket, for both the medication and the care, just to safely stop a drug they were prescribed. Extalvo replaces that guesswork with a precise, evidence-based path designed to become a covered standard of care.
EXTALVO INC. Mission Statement
The Extalvo Mission
Starting a medication is careful and controlled. Stopping one should be too. Our mission is to make tapering off dependence-forming medications safe, precise, and supported.
The Problem We Exist to Solve
What We Disrupt
Who We Are
We are scientists and clinicians who choose to work on a problem most of the industry ignores because it means helping patients take less medicine, not more. Our commitment is simple: the best scientists are not loyal to products — they are loyal to patients. Extalvo is building the exit.
