- Recent study indicates psychedelic compounds show significant promise in treating a range of mental-health disorders
- Participants given psilocybin therapy reported a rapid, sustained improvement in their depression
- Cybin’s CYB003 has demonstrated less variability, faster onset, shorter duration and better brain penetration than oral psilocybin
A new study sponsored by Imperial College London reports that psychedelic compounds may be effective in treating mental-health disorders (https://ibn.fm/xSdZv). The study supports efforts made by Cybin (NEO: CYBN) (NYSE American: CYBN), which is focused on progressing psychedelics to therapeutics by engineering proprietary drug-discovery platforms, innovative drug-delivery systems, novel formulation approaches and treatment regimens for mental-health disorders.
“Psychedelic compounds like LSD, Ecstasy and psilocybin mushrooms have shown significant promise in treating a range of mental-health disorders, with participants in clinical studies often describing tremendous progress taming the demons of post-traumatic stress disorder, or finding unexpected calm and clarity as they face a terminal illness,” states a recent New York Times article reporting on the study. “But exactly how psychedelics might therapeutically rewire the mind remains an enigma.”
The article notes that a group of neuroscientists wondered if advanced neuroimaging technology studying the brain might provide answers. They conducted a study with 43 participants suffering from severe depression. During the study, participants were given either psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, or a conventional antidepressant; the participants were not told which one they received. As part of the study, functional magnetic resonance imaging (“MRI”) took two snapshots of brain activity for each participant; the images were taken the day before receiving the first dose and then approximately three weeks after the final dosage was administered.
“What they found, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, was illuminating, both figuratively and literally,” the New York Times reports. “Over the course of three weeks, participants who had been given the antidepressant escitalopram reported mild improvement in their symptoms, and the scans continued to suggest the stubborn, telltale signs of a mind hobbled by major depressive disorder. Neural activity was constrained within certain regions of the brain, a reflection of the rigid thought patterns that can trap those with depression in a negative feedback loop of pessimism and despair.”
The article continues, “By contrast, the participants given psilocybin therapy reported a rapid and sustained improvement in their depression, and the scans showed flourishes of neural activity across large swaths of the brain that persisted for the three weeks. That heightened connectivity, they said, resembled the cognitive agility of a healthy brain that, for example, can toggle between a morning bout of melancholia, a stressful day at work and an evening of unencumbered revelry with friends. Although the authors acknowledged the limitations of the study, including its small size and short time frame, they said psilocybin appeared to have a ‘liberating’ effect on the brains of people with severe depression.”
It is precisely these types of results that fuel Cybin’s ongoing focus on developing psilocybin for undertreated mental-health disorders. Currently, Cybin’s proprietary biopharmaceutial version of psilocybin — CYB003 — has demonstrated less variability, faster onset, shorter duration and better brain penetration than oral psilocybin. The proprietary deuterated psilocybin analog is the focus of the company’s upcoming phase 1/2a clinical trial. CYB003 will be the first psilocybin analog to be evaluated in phase 1/2a development for the treatment of major depressive disorder (https://ibn.fm/G0RUS).
Cybin is a leading ethical biopharmaceutical company, working with a network of world-class partners and internationally recognized scientists, on a mission to create safe and effective therapeutics for patients to address a multitude of mental-health issues. Headquartered in Canada and founded in 2019, Cybin is operational in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
For more information, visit the company’s website at www.Cybin.com.
NOTE TO INVESTORS: The latest news and updates relating to CYBN are available in the company’s newsroom at https://ibn.fm/CYBN
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