Psy­che­delics have ex­pe­ri­enced a re­nais­sance in re­cent years amid a tor­rent of pre­clin­i­cal and clin­i­cal re­search sug­gest­ing it might pro­vide a path to treat mood dis­or­ders con­ven­tion­al reme­dies have on­ly scraped at. Now a pre­clin­i­cal tri­al from a young biotech sug­gests at least one psy­che­del­ic com­pound has ef­fects be­yond the mind, and — if you be­lieve the still very, very ear­ly hype — could pro­vide the first sin­gle rem­e­dy for some of the main com­pli­ca­tions of obe­si­ty.

A study in mice fund­ed by Eleu­sis and pub­lished in Sci­en­tif­ic Re­ports found a long-known drug called (R)-DOI could be used to treat car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, re­duc­ing in­flam­ma­tion in the aor­ta, de­creas­ing over­all and HDL cho­les­terol lev­els, and po­ten­tial­ly curb­ing di­a­betes by in­creas­ing glu­cose tol­er­ance.

Lead au­thor Charles Nichols says di­a­betes and high cho­les­terol, though of­ten re­sults of the same un­der­ly­ing con­di­tion, re­quire sep­a­rate drugs and a re­strict­ed di­et.

“This mod­el that treats car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease and meta­bol­ic dis­ease — it’s all-en­com­pass­ing,” Nichols, a pro­fes­sor of phar­ma­col­o­gy at LSU, told End­points News. “Trans­lat­ed in­to the clin­ic in hu­mans, it would be as if some­one was obese, had di­a­betes, had high cho­les­terol, and was able to take a low dose of this drug at a sub-be­hav­ioral lev­el and re­al­ly treat sev­er­al dif­fer­ent as­pects of the com­pli­ca­tions of be­ing obese.”

They’re bold words, though al­most mut­ed in a psy­che­del­ic field brim­ming with hype. Re­searchers have called the re­sults of some psy­chi­atric stud­ies “mind-blow­ing” as clin­i­cal tri­als hint at the pow­er of psilo­cy­bin (the chem­i­cal in mag­ic mush­rooms) to al­le­vi­ate de­pres­sion and MD­MA to re­lieve PTSD.

David Nichols Pur­due

The no­tion that the same class of drugs might have oth­er phys­i­o­log­i­cal and specif­i­cal­ly an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ry ef­fects is new­er. Nichols, the son of long­time psy­che­del­ic re­search pro­po­nent David Nichols, un­der­stands the rhetoric can get rosy but points out that the tri­al was tar­get­ed. They test­ed DOI in oth­er types of tis­sue and when it had lit­tle ef­fect, fo­cused on vas­cu­lar in­di­ca­tions.

“This is not a com­plete panacea,” said Nichols, who ear­li­er tout­ed his an­i­mal stud­ies in­di­cat­ing DOI’s po­ten­tial in asth­ma.

Nichols dis­cov­ered that sero­tonin 5-HT_2A re­cep­tor ag­o­nists, fol­low­ing a well-un­der­stood path­way psy­che­delics act on, can re­duce in­flam­ma­tion by ac­ci­dent in his LSU lab in 2008. Lat­er, he got a cold call from Shlo­mi Raz, a for­mer Wall Street ex­ec­u­tive who went on to get a mas­ter’s in psy­chol­o­gy at NYU.

Shlo­mi Raz

Eleu­sis launched in 2013 with a mis­sion, Raz told End­points, of ex­plor­ing the broad pos­si­bil­i­ties for these ag­o­nists, with their work so far rang­ing from a tri­al on the ef­fects of ‘mi­cro-dos­ing’ LSD on time per­cep­tion to fil­ing a patent for the treat­ment of Alzheimer’s with LSD. Nichols has pub­lished sev­er­al pre­vi­ous stud­ies on psy­che­delics and an­ti-in­flam­ma­to­ries, but this was no­table in its abil­i­ty to on­ramp in­to clin­i­cal tri­als.

Raz be­lieves what is com­mon­ly called psy­che­delics have a broad ar­ray of im­pacts be­yond their “psy­che­del­ic” func­tion. He says he has peer-re­viewed re­search com­ing soon that will help bol­ster that claim, and that the cen­tral ques­tion is how to un­lock those ef­fects with­out trig­ger­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal im­pact.

“If you think of it as an ice­berg,” Raz said, “maybe the tip of the ice­berg is the psy­chi­atrics and the part be­low the sur­face is not psy­chi­atric.”

The vas­cu­lar study showed phys­i­o­log­i­cal with­out any psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fects (mice giv­en a psy­che­del­ic can some­times show be­hav­ior con­sis­tent with psy­chosis). The re­searchers fat­tened up mice on the “West­ern di­et” for four months and at in­ter­vals ad­min­is­tered DOI to one group and saline to a con­trol.

They found that vas­cu­lar in­flam­ma­tion was low­er in the DOI, as they an­tic­i­pat­ed. They hadn’t an­tic­i­pat­ed that cho­les­terol would be down and glu­cose tol­er­ance up, and they’re still not sure why.

Nichols, though, said the study was trans­lat­able to a clin­i­cal tri­al, and he was hope­ful there would be a drug with­in 10 to 20 years. Reg­u­la­tion, more than the sci­ence, was the bar­ri­er. Raz was mum about what’s next, both in terms of oth­er ap­pli­ca­tions and in busi­ness mod­el, but he left one clue:

“I can tell you it’s not a pill,” he said, “at first.”

Celyad’s view on developing and delivering a CAR T-cell therapy with multi-tumor specificity combined with cell manufacturing success
Overview
Transitioning potential therapeutic assets from academia into the commercial environment is an exercise that is largely underappreciated by stakeholders, except for drug developers themselves. The promise of preclinical or early clinical results drives enthusiasm, but the pragmatic delivery of a therapy outside of small, local testing is most often a major challenge for drug developers especially, including among other things, the manufacturing challenges that surround the production of just-in-time and personalized autologous cell therapy products.

Amgen has signed up to be AbbVie’s neighbor in South San Francisco as it moves into a nine-story R&D facility in the booming biotech hub.

The arrangement gives Amgen 240,000 square feet of space on the Gateway of Pacific Campus, just a few minutes drive from its current digs at Oyster Point. The new hub will open in 2022 and house the big biotech’s Bay Area employees working on cardiometabolic, inflammation and oncology research.

Scripps and AbbVie go way back. Research conducted in the lab of Scripps scientist Richard Lerner led to the discovery of Humira. The antibody, approved by the FDA in 2002 and sold by AbbVie, went on to become the world’s bestselling treatment. In 2018, the drugmaker and the non-profit organization signed a pact focused on developing cancer treatments — and now, the scope of that partnership has broadened to encompass a range of diseases, including immunological and neurological conditions.

Three Samsung executives in Korea are going to jail.

The convictions came in what prosecutors had billed as “biggest crime of evidence destruction in the history of South Korea”: a case of alleged corporate intrigue that was thrown open when investigators found what was hidden beneath the floor of a Samsung BioLogics plant. Eight employees in total were found guilty of evidence tampering and the three executives were each sentenced to up to two years in prison.

Cellarity started with a simple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahvejian and his team were floating around at Flagship Pioneering: to digitally encode a cell.

As he and his senior associate Nick Plugis dug deeper into the concept, they found that most of the models others have developed take a bottom-up approach, where they assemble the molecules inside cells and the connections between them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down approach, aided by single-cell transcriptomics and machine learning, to gauge the behavior of the entire cellular network?

The biopharma R&D food chain is paying off with a plan at Sanofi to pitch regulators on a new drug for an orphan disease called cold agglutinin disease.

The pharma giant ushered out a statement Tuesday morning — after it spelled out plans to radically restructure the company, abandoning cardio and diabetes research altogether — saying that their C1s inhibitor sutimlimab had cleared the pivotal study.