London: Europe’s Ground Zero for Studying Psychedelics

Europe’s first commercial facility for psychedelic drug trials, operated by British startup Clerkenwell Health, will open in London this August, per an announcement published on LinkedIn yesterday.

🤔 Why it’s a big deal: Drug developers are increasingly exploring psychedelics as potential treatments for mental health conditions like PTSD and addictions, but their status as controlled substances can make it bureaucratically challenging and expensive to progress through clinical trials, The Guardian reports.

That’s where Clerkenwell Health comes in:

• Rather than developing one compound or class of compounds for a single condition, the startup will act as a regulatory liaison with multiple drug developers who want to study a gamut of mental health conditions using psychedelics.
• It’ll also offer training for therapists who want to work with psychedelic drugs.

📸 The big picture: Psychedelics like MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD — combined with cognitive behavioral therapy — have shown promise for treating a range of addictions and mental health disorders, including treatment-resistant depression and PTSD.

🧠 One interesting thing: Those who underwent psilocybin-assisted therapy in a peer-reviewed study published earlier this year experienced noticeable changes in brain patterns associated with depression. No such changes were seen in the brains of the control group receiving SSRIs, suggesting that psilocybin acts differently on the brain.