Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, witnessed a lot of recreational drug use growing up in the city in the 1970s and later as a college student in Oregon. At the time, drugs such as mushrooms, LSD and marijuana were considered by many to be toxic and frightening, but Mitchell also saw hints of how certain psychedelics could help people in crisis.
“When I first saw things like ibogaine [a dissociative psychedelic] in action, I was blown away,” she told BioSpace, adding that “it was clear [psychedelics] had so much potential.”
The idea of using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders has been around since the 1950s, when academics investigated LSD and psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms) as therapeutics for trauma, depression and addiction. But early work lacked the rigor of today’s standards, Mitchell said, and regulatory agencies wouldn’t touch them. In the 1990s, when she approached the FDA as a graduate student about giving psilocybin to men who had survived the AIDS crisis with lasting demoralization and depression, “I was laughed out of the building,” she said.
And yet today, Mitchell is the lead investigator on a Phase III clinical trial that may well lead to the first true FDA-approved psychedelic therapeutic: a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the intervening years, cultural shifts combined with rigorous scientific study and investments from biopharma have ushered in a new generation of psychedelic treatments, some of which have already been approved in other countries. As stakeholders in the U.S. await the FDA’s decision on MDMA, industry analysts report that interest in psychedelics is only increasing.
Read more at BioSpace.com.
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