Team:SDU-Denmark/Administration
Administration
Abstract
The future prospect for our project lies within manufacturing
psilocybin and thereby making it accessible for clinical trials.
Our project idea is centered in the manufacturing track. Still, when we think about future prospects, we would like the psilocybin that is produced in our cell factory to be used for treatment of people suffering from depression. Safe and efficient usage of the compound requires proper administration of the drug.
In our quest to find research studies already concerned with administering psilocybin to patients, our team spoke with Rasmus W. Licht (See photo to the left), professor at Aalborg University and chair of psychiatric research at Aalborg University Hospital. He is leading the Danish part of a large international study initiated and sponsored by the British company, Compass, aiming at testing the potential efficacy of psilocybin in patients with treatment-resistant depression. He explained that patient recruitment started in 2019 after permission from the authorities was granted. The planned number of 220 patients across all the centers has now been reached. The patients were randomly and blindly treated with either 1 mg, 10 mg or 25 mg of psilocybin in the context of integrative psychotherapy and under safe and supporting conditions. In that way, the study is also a dose-finding study. The highest dose, which is expected to evoke a psychedelic experience in most cases, was hypothesized to be superior to the others in terms of efficacy. According to Rasmus W. Licht, the results will probably be available in the first half of 2022.
We will venture out to help researchers by providing psilocybin, that our cell factories produce, so it subsequently can be dosed accurately according to the available evidence, as our project is formed based on the manufacturing track.
Experiments
