Psychedelics – News and Features

New research shows how the depth of sleep can impact our brain’s ability to efficiently wash away waste and toxic proteins. Because sleep often becomes increasingly lighter and more disrupted as we become older, the study reinforces and potentially explains the links between aging, sleep deprivation, and heightened risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

A form of the hallucinogenic party drug ketamine has cleared one of the final hurdles toward clinical use as an antidepressant. During a meeting at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in Silver Spring, Maryland, an independent advisory panel voted 14-2 in favor of recommending a compound known as esketamine for use in treating depression.

Researchers have launched an ultra-large virtual docking library expected to grow to more than 1 billion molecules by next year. It will expand by 1000-fold the number of such “make-on-demand” compounds readily available to scientists for chemical biology and drug discovery.

Clinical treatments for neurological and mood disorders like social anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder have failed to show consistent efficacy in treating patients. VistaGen Therapeutics is aiming to correct that. We talked to VistaGen’s CEO, Shawn Singh, about the need for treatments in this area and why Vistagen thinks their compounds AV-101 and PH94B could be promising therapies.

Patients with moderate to severe depression reported significant improvements in mood when researchers precisely stimulated a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), according to a UC San Francisco research study published Nov. 29, 2018, in Current Biology. The results are an important step toward developing a therapy for people with treatment-resistant depression, which affects as many as 30 percent of depression patients, the authors say.

New research from King’s College London has found that MDMA, the main ingredient in ecstasy, causes people to cooperate better - but only with trustworthy people. In the first study to look in detail at how MDMA impacts cooperative behaviour the researchers also identified changes to activity in brain regions linked to social processing.

Researchers just ran the first ever pre-registered scientific study on the microdosing of psychedelics and found some very promising results.

LSD changes the communication patterns between regions of the brain, a new study by researchers of the University of Zurich and Yale University shows. The study also provides insights into how mental health disorders develop and how these could be treated.

The use of minute doses of magic mushrooms and truffles containing psychedelic substances could induce a state of unconstrained thought that may produce more new, creative ideas, say study.

COMPASS Pathways, a life sciences company, has received Breakthrough Therapy designation from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression. The FDA designates a drug as a Breakthrough Therapy if preliminary clinical evidence shows that it may demonstrate substantial improvement over available therapy.