Breakthrough Psychedelic Medicine Research
Mirroring the burgeoning legislative reform landscape, the research pipeline exploring the efficacy of psychedelic medicine is blossoming. Here are three examples worth your time:
1. “The Key To Treating Intractable Mental Health Disorders Could Be Regrowing Shrunken Brain Cells [With Psychedelics].”
Writing for Politico, Erin Schumaker, Ben Leonard, and Ruth Reader detailed research published this month that found that while “brain cells … tend to be atrophied … in the brains of people with conditions like depression, PTSD and substance-use disorder,” “a single dose of [psychedelic medicines, like psilocybin or MDMA] can cause rapid growth of new dendrites – branches – from nerve cells, and formation of new spines on those dendrites.” More granularly:
“The study found that psychedelics could cross cell membranes more easily than serotonin could, triggering brain cells to regrow. ‘Traditional SSRIs will promote the growth of those cortical neurons, but they do so very, very slowly,’ [said David Olson, founding director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at the University of California, Davis]. ‘It takes weeks to months for those neurons to grow back’ … [That’s why Olson calls these drugs] “psychoplastogens—because of their ability to regrow and remodel connections in the brain’ … While people typically take SSRIs daily to sustain their effect, Olson thinks psychedelics might promote neuron growth for a longer period, allowing patients to take medication less often — maybe once a week, once a month or even once a year.”
2. National Cancer Institute Awards Its First Psychedelics Research Grant.
The grant, which totals roughly two million dollars over five years, was co-awarded to researchers at the University of Colorado–Denver and New York University to “look at the effects of psilocybin in helping to relieve feelings associated with a cancer diagnosis, including hopelessness, existential distress, anxiety, and depression.” As a CU-Denver release explains:
“The study calls for researchers to enroll 100 late-stage cancer patients … A therapist will first meet with each patient for five to seven hours to get to know the person, explain the process, and prepare them for the study drug session. Then, each patient will participate in a single psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy session for about six or seven hours…monitored by a licensed therapist. Those who receive the placebo will later have an opportunity to take psilocybin, should they wish to do so.”
Dr. Jim Grisby, one of the researchers leading the Denver study said that he believes that the use of psilocybin “could pioneer a way for a new era of healing” both because of the potential for increased efficacy relative to existing treatments and because “the safety of these drugs is pretty amazing.”
Related: This won’t be the first clinical trial exploring the effects of psilocybin therapy on end-of-life cancer patients. For example, “a landmark study from UCLA Medical Center found that psilocybin provides significant relief for ‘the profound existential anxiety and despair that often accompany advanced-stage cancers”; and a more recent New York University study found that psilocybin-assisted therapy produced “rapid and sustained improvements in anxiety and depression” as well as “decreased cancer-related demoralization and hopelessness” in terminal cancer patients.
3. “The World's First In-Clinic Trial Of Psychedelic Therapy In Conjunction With VR.”
Writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, James Purtill details how …
“Australian researchers traveled to a two-day psychedelics retreat in the Netherlands to ask attendees if they would like to take part in a study… They consumed the psilocybin they'd been planning to take, and then, hours later, as the effects were waning, they put on VR headsets. Now they were immersed in a soothing outdoor environment hung with stars like giant fireflies. In this VR world, they could grab a star and use it as an audio recording device, to speak to themselves about what had happened over the past few hours… The audio recordings they made formed a twinkling constellation representing their experience. The following day, they returned to this VR world, and accessed their recordings to unpack and make sense of their experience.”
Purtill notes that “the results had not yet been published, but the people who had used VR in the dosing phase had better recall of their psychedelic experience.” Now, “a larger trial is in the works,” which will be “the world's first in-clinic trial of psychedelic therapy in conjunction with VR.” The idea is that the virtual reality experience, and especially the fact that the person’s thoughts are recorded and organized for better recall, could help “bridge the gap between dosing and integration phases by helping the patient recall what they had experienced,” which makes it “easier for the patient and therapist to dive deeper into this and build as much on it as possible.”
