Inside a laboratory at St. Joseph’s University, researchers think they have found a new drug that could shape the future of psychedelic therapy in health care. Or, really, more than 200 new drugs.
Currently, most psychedelics are illegal in the U.S. under federal law, although certain exceptions are allowed, such as for those being tested in clinical trials. Ketamine, a legal drug with psychedelic-like effects used for general anesthesia, is increasingly being prescribed off-label to treat mental health conditions, such as depression.
These new compounds are not expected to receive the criticism raised when the company made an earlier attempt to patent a specific psilocybin, said Graham Pechenik, an attorney based in San Francisco who monitors the psychedelics and cannabis industries.Designing a new psychedelic drug The introduction of a fluorine compound to psychedelic drugs had been attempted before. Alexander Shulgin, the wildly prolific chemist who popularized MDMA in the mid-1970s, tried it. As did David E. Nichols, a veteran pharmacologist working out of Purdue University.
In lieu of human subjects, Wallach partners with another lab that administers the new compounds to mice. When administered a given compound, their head twitches serve as a barometer for psychedelic activity. Using this metric — called the Head-Twitch Response, or HTR — the new compounds seem very promising.Wallach, Dybek, and the team at Compass Pathways could still be years from clinical trials with human test subjects.