Com­pass' sin­gle-dose psilo­cy­bin shows strong ef­fi­ca­cy in PhII treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion tri­al

Treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion may have fi­nal­ly met its match (for some) as new Phase II re­sults pub­lished in the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine yes­ter­day show the fea­si­bil­i­ty of a sin­gle dose of psilo­cy­bin in help­ing pa­tients with treat­ment-re­sis­tant ma­jor de­pres­sion for up to 12 weeks.

The EU- and US-run tri­al from Com­pass Path­ways showed that for its syn­thet­ic, pro­pri­etary for­mu­la­tion of psilo­cy­bin (at dos­es of 25 mg, 10 mg, and 1 mg con­trol group), 29% of 233 par­tic­i­pants with TRD were in re­mis­sion af­ter three weeks (p<0.002) – which UK-based Com­pass says is “high­er than the re­sponse rates seen for equiv­a­lent lines of treat­ment in the Se­quenced Treat­ment Al­ter­na­tives to Re­lieve De­pres­sion (STAR*D) study,” which was a large prospec­tive tri­al look­ing at dif­fer­ent ma­jor de­pres­sion treat­ments.

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