[Roland]:...We can do reductionistic neuroscience.
Whether we're doing brain imaging work, we can ask questions about pharmacology, we can
ask questions about biological and genetic dispositions or behavioral interactions or
set and setting conditions that modulate those experiences.
And to bring this to your question, we can look at therapeutic effects.
And so, one of the first studies that we've conducted looking at therapeutic effects is
to look at cancer patients who are experiencing very significant anxiety or fear in face of
a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.
And it turns out that this kind of very disquieting existential anxiety and sometimes depression
very often accompanies these life-threatening cancer diagnoses as you might expect that
it would.
And our treatment options are quite limited, so we do have our classic antidepressants
and our anxiolytics.
And there are different kinds of psychotherapy approaches, but for many people, these interventions
are not very effective and they can really experience a very degraded quality of life
and a sense of hopelessness and depression that really diminishes their whole experience
in the latter parts of their lives.
So, it was this population that we were interested in treating with psilocybin to see whether
there would be therapeutic effects.
One of the reasons we chose that population is that there were studies back in the 50s
and 60s that produced suggestive evidence that compounds from this category of the classic
hallucinogens like LSD and some other psilocybin analogs might be effective in this regard,
but these trials were not conducted under the rigorous clinical standards that would
be expected today.
And just a footnote, of course, work with these classic hallucinogens really came to
a standstill in the late 60s with the psychedelic movement and the cultural reactivity we had
to that which placed these drugs into schedule one.
They became very difficult to obtain.
There was no funding that was available, and the media surrounding the surgeon use of these
compounds back in the 60s led people to conclude incorrectly as it turns out that the risks
of exposure to these compounds were greater than any possible benefits.
But functionally, what happened was there was a period of several decades where no clinical
research was done with these compounds.
So, people had made observations previously that there might be a signal here.
There had been one pilot study published a couple years ago with a low dose of psilocybin
out of UCLA.
And then we undertook our study at Johns Hopkins.
A group at NYU ran a somewhat smaller study and we co-published just this last week, in
fact, our results.
And the results really were quite striking.
They confirmed everything we had seen in the healthy volunteers that is these very vulnerable
cancer patients who had very significant anxiety or depression experience the same types of...experience
is very often classified as this mystical-type experiences, but they were deeply moved by
these experiences.
And interestingly, these people experience very large and sustained decreases in anxiety
and depression, and the effects occurred really quite promptly after the administration of
the drug.
And although the design of the study was such, it was a crossover design so people were crossed
over between essentially an inactive dose of psilocybin to an active dose or vice-versa.
So the strongest conclusion we can make comparing our placebo condition and our active condition
is this effect lasted out to five weeks, but in fact, we followed people out to six months
and there was no evidence that there was any significant rate of relapse over that period
of time.
So, in other words, most people who demonstrated a large therapeutic effect remained having
low levels of anxiety or depression out to six months.
So there's suggestive evidence that there's a long duration of that...
[Rhonda]: After one treatment.
[Roland]: ...after one treatment, yeah.
[Rhonda]: That's pretty amazing.