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President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to encourage expanded research into certain psychedelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. The FDA is expected to issue national priority vouchers to three psychedelics, which will allow the review of those drugs to be approved quickly.
Alex Kwan
Professor
Alex Kwan, professor of biomedical engineering at Cornell University, studies the ways psychiatric drugs such as psilocybin, ketamine and 5-MeO-DMT rewire the brain’s neurological circuitry, offering promise as therapeutic treatments for depression.
Kwan says:
"An accelerated review pathway could help bring much-needed treatments forward more efficiently, particularly for conditions like depression and substance use where current options fall short. At the same time, speed must be balanced with rigor, especially for compounds with complex and variable effects like ibogaine.
“In my research, including work on psychedelics like psilocybin, we find that these drugs can promote durable changes in neural circuits by enhancing structural plasticity, but those effects depend strongly on brain activity and behavioral context.
"For example, very little is known about how ibogaine acts in the brain – we need to know more before pushing them as therapies. Ibogaine is atypical and has key differences in its chemistry compared to well-studied psychedelics like psilocybin. It is definitely not the same as LSD or psilocybin that have established safety profiles and gone through some clinical trials already."
