In a new study, researchers developed a safer version of the psychedelic drug ibogaine, with the potential for treating addiction, depression and other psychiatric disorders.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of California, Davis.
Psychedelics are some of the most powerful drugs we know of that affect the brain.
Ibogaine is extracted from the plant Tabernanthe iboga. It can have powerful anti-addiction effects such as reducing drug cravings and preventing relapse.
But there are also serious side-effects, including hallucinations and cardiac toxicity, and the drug is a Schedule 1 controlled substance under U.S. law.
The team is one of a few in the U.S. licensed to work with Schedule 1 substances.
They set out to create a synthetic analog of ibogaine that retained therapeutic properties without the undesired effects of the psychedelic compound.
They engineered a new, synthetic molecule which they named tabernanthalog or TBG.
Unlike ibogaine, the new molecule is water-soluble and can be synthesized in a single step.
Experiments show that it is less toxic than ibogaine, which can cause heart attacks and has been responsible for several deaths.
The team found TBG increased the formation of new dendrites (branches) in rat nerve cells, and of new spines on those dendrites.
That’s similar to the effect of drugs like ketamine, LSD, MDMA and DMT (the active component in the plant extract ayahuasca) on connections between nerve cells.
TBG did not, however, cause a head twitch response in mice, which is known to correlate with hallucinations in humans.
A series of experiments show that the new drug has promising positive effects.
The team thinks that TBG works by changing the structure of neurons in key brain circuits involved in depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and addiction.
One author of the study is David Olson, an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Davis.
The study is published in Nature.
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