In a suburb of Vancouver, Canada, a nondescript three-story building sits alongside a strip of parking lots. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary commercial office space. But inside is something more extraordinary: rows of shelves stacked with plastic tubs full of magic mushrooms—mushrooms that contain the hallucinogenic chemical psilocybin. In a year, enough psychedelic mushrooms can be...
Reunion Neuroscience , a start-up focused on mental health, has raised a $103 million series A round, co-led by MPM BioImpact and the Novo Nordisk Foundation's investment arm Novo Holdings. The company's lead asset, RE104, is a novel psychedelic that is being developed to treat adjustment disorder in cancer patients as well as postpartum depression. RE104 is a prodrug of 4-OH-DiPT, which acts...
Lusaris Therapeutics has launched with $60 million in series A financing to develop therapies for severe neuropsychiatric and neurological conditions. The start-up says the type of compounds it is developing, serotonergic neuroplastogens, are able to induce favorable neural plasticity. Its lead candidate, for treatment-resistant depression, is a formulation of the psychedelic 5-Methoxy- N , N...
Over the past decade, psychedelic compounds like psilocybin and ecstasy have emerged as potentially life-changing treatments for mental illnesses, including major depressive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. Read on to learn how some companies are trying to bring these once-demonized drugs to market and how others are hoping to use chemistry to eliminate their hallucinogenic effects—a...
Scientists have long sought the secrets of the 5-HT 2A serotonin receptor—a central nervous system receptor that binds hallucinogenic compounds, including LSD and psilocybin. Many hope to discover why these molecules cause hallucinations when they bind to 5-HT 2A while other compounds that bind to the receptor, including serotonin, do not. LSD and psilocybin have been shown to treat mood...
Delix Therapeutics has raised $70 million in series A financing to develop therapies inspired by psychedelics to treat neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases. The Boston-based start-up joins a list of more than a dozen drug companies developing psychedelic-based therapies for mental illnesses . CEO Mark Rus says Delix is part of a "psychedelic renaissance," in which doctors,...
By systematically tweaking the structure of the psychedelic compound ibogaine, chemists have created a molecule that may someday find use as a treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and addiction. The compound, which the researchers call tabernanthalog, has a simpler structure than ibogaine, making it easier to synthesize. Researchers in David E. Olson’s lab at the...
A team of researchers has turned Escherichia coli into tiny bioreactors that can manufacture large amounts of psilocybin, the ingredient in magic mushrooms that leads to their psychoactive effects (Metab. Eng. 2019, DOI: 10.1016/j.ymben.2019.09.009). With the compound in clinical trials for treating depression and other brain diseases, says J. Andrew Jones, the Miami University chemical...
The euphoria and hallucinations induced from eating Psilocybe "magic mushrooms" have earned the fungi a cult following. Albert Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz, isolated and determined the structure of psilocybin, the main ingredient in the mushrooms that leads to the psychedelic effects, nearly 60 years ago. That discovery and subsequent mind-altering experiments by Harvard University psychologist...