When Boston-based biotech Seaport Therapeutics launched in April with $100 million in venture funding, it joined a growing cadre of biotech companies that are fine-tuning psychedelic drugs to treat a range of mental health problems. These ‘next-generation psychedelics’ aim to overcome some of the limitations of using classical psychedelics as therapeutic drugs for conditions such as depression and substance use disorder.
But the psychoactive effects of such compounds pose some major challenges. It can be difficult to find a reliable placebo for a blinded clinical trial, for example — there’s no way a patient can mistake a sugar pill for a dose of LSD. And patients typically need close supervision for many hours while under the influence of the drugs, making it burdensome, expensive and impractical for many patients.
Psychedelics are a broad and somewhat ill-defined class of compounds. The psychoactive effects of these drugs, including hallucinations and feelings of dissociation from the body, vary dramatically depending on the compound and the dose.
Psilocybin faces similar challenges because a therapeutic trip can last for eight hours. This is partly because the drug must first be metabolized in the body to form psilocin, the compound that targets the 5-HTCybin, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Toronto, has shortened that trip with its psilocybin analog CYB003, which does not require metabolic activation in the liver and intestines.
Gilgamesh has been using machine learning algorithms to study videos of mice in head-twitch experiments, to accurately quantify the animals’ movements. They are also usingprobes to directly monitor how hundreds of individual neurons respond to the drugs, offering a much higher resolution than conventional electroencephalograms.agonist that is structurally related to psilocybin and DMT.