Tucked away in a lab across the street from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, a small group of scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Agriculture Department is growing some of the most highly concentrated, pure and potent organic psilocybin “magic” mushrooms ever created by man.
While the above sentence may be jarring for anyone familiar with the CIA’s infamous Project MK Ultra – a series of experiments in the 1950s and ’60s in which the US government gave high quantities of LSD and other drugs to human test subjects without their consent – the modern field of study surrounding psychoactive compounds has long shed the immoral practices of physicians’ past.
Many countries are now shifting their attitudes toward the prohibition of certain psychoactive compounds, notably psilocybin mushrooms, due to their relatively low toxicity levels and seemingly high potential for treatment in a wide variety of medical fields.
Last February, Oregon became the first US state to both legalize psilocybin mushrooms for mental-health treatment in supervised settings and decriminalize it on a state-wide basis after it had been decriminalized by multiple US cities in recent years.
The reason for this rapid process of legalization and decriminalization has been spurred on by the scientific community, with studies indicating that psilocybin has a positive effect in treating depression, anxiety, addiction, anorexia, obesity, cluster headaches, Alzheimer’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder and a variety of personality disorders.
An Israeli pharmaceutical R&D company, PsyRx, is looking to take advantage of this new boom in research by being the first to use biological bioreactor technology to produce psilocybin and other biological psychoactive compounds at a consistent quality that meets GMP standards.
The Jerusalem Post toured PsyRx’s lab and met with the company’s co-founders, Dr. Asher Holzer, the chairman; Itay Hecht, the CEO; and Dr. Kobi Buxdorf, the CTO, to find out more about the company’s vision for the future of pharmaceutical psychoactives.
While psilocybin mushrooms – in both “trip” form and in smaller, controlled doses often referred to as “microdoses” – have shown promise in a variety of medical fields, the company’s current main focus is on the fields of depression and addiction.
In addition to psilocybin, the company also manufactures high-standard ibogaine, a psychoactive alkaloid that has been shown to be effective in reducing addiction severity and is especially useful for the reduction of opioid withdrawal symptoms.
Ibogaine has also been known to affect the brain in ways similar to antidepressant drugs, but through different neural pathways.
This leads the company’s researchers to believe they might be able to shrink antidepressant-drug effect times from weeks and even months to a matter of days, while also drastically reducing side effects.
Ibogaine comes from the Tabernanthe Iboga shrub, which is native to Central and West Africa – mainly Gabon, Cameroon and Congo – and has traditionally been used in rites of passage and healing ceremonies.
The shrub normally needs to first be grown for seven years before it is possible to extract the active compounds. The plant is also increasingly rare, and this makes PsyRx a potential way to study the effects of the compound sustainably, without interfering with the local biodiversity and while reducing the production time from years to weeks.
The company’s choice of using a biological bioreactor also allows it to grow more sterile and consistent compounds than would be possibly achievable in nature and in a manner that allows for more accurate clinical studies to be performed.
The process was so efficient that the active compound of the mushrooms could be grown and fully extracted solely from the fungal mycelium, the fine film of fungal threads that the mushrooms sprout from, essentially doing away with the need to grow the mature mushroom caps, Holzer told the Post.
The scientists minimize biological mutations from changing the wide variety of additional compounds that could possibly change the drug’s eventual effect by essentially having a “parent fungus” that they can take samples from, instead of growing new, more biologically diverse crops each time.
PsyRx has so far completed its initial goals of successfully growing psilocybin on solid and liquid surfaces. The Post observed colorful, mushroom-filled beakers and petri dishes scattered around the company’s lab.
It has also begun its prior-to-submission phase to the FDA for approval to test an Ibogaine-based micro-dosed antidepressant drug in combination with a known FSSR drug. Its plan for its development is set to be finalized in 2022.
With the worldwide medical community’s shifting attitudes on psychedelic compounds as potential treatments for mental-health issues, and with the spotlight that the COVID-19 pandemic recently placed on the importance of mental health, PsyRx seems like a company worth paying attention to in the coming years.