Background

Depression affects around 280 million worldwide and one of the major unmet needs is the limited efficacy of the common pharmacological treatments for this pathology. In the last years psychedelics are aiming to overcome the limitation of the current antidepressants and they are tested for mental disorders. However, on the problems of these class of drugs is the close supervision that patient need while under the influence of this drug mainly because of the trip they cause.

Summary of the findings

Several biotech companies have billion dollars of funding to develop novel psychedelic drugs to treat mental health problem with milder or shorter trips that the ones caused by classical psychedelics such as psilocybin, found in “magic mushrooms”, and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the active ingredient of ayahuasca. The studies are also moving versus another major challenge in this field: the research of a reliable placebo for the blinded clinical trial, since it is impossible for patients to mistake the placebo with the dose of drug.

Novelty of the results in the field/ whether and how these results advance knowledge in the field

The billion-dollar question in this field is: is possible to reach a therapeutic benefit with psychedelics without the trip? And is possible to reduce the costs associated with this class of drugs? Biopharmaceutical companies are moving in this direction and recent results show that a psilocybin analogue is able to reduce the trip at 4-6 hours and another component similar to both psylocibin and DMT at 60-90 minutes while achieving antidepressant effects. Moreover, they are also using machine learning to study the effects of these novel compound at preclinical level to predict the neuronal response to these drugs as well as computational modeling to design potential drug candidates.

By Paola Brivio

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02285-1;

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-024-02285-1