Empowered Patient Podcast Discovering and Developing Psychedelic-Inspired Therapeutics to Address Mental Health Issues with Joe Tucker Enveric Biosciences
Joe Tucker, the CEO of Enveric Biosciences, is discovering, developing and testing psychedelic-inspired therapies for the treatment of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Current treatments target receptors in the brain to increase the concentration of serotonin in the brain by going through classic neurotransmitter pathways. The Enveric Psybrary portfolio and PsyAI drive drug discovery to create new molecules that synthesize chemistry and how nature makes molecules to target new receptors.
Joe elaborates, "This one's completely different. This one is actually going through a receptor that's never been targeted before, 5-HT2A. And it's an adjunct to psychotherapy at this point. The leading molecules are an adjunct to psychotherapy. Although there's some interesting new work, including stuff that we're working on, no one has yet been able to separate those two in humans. But that's where we'd like to go next, is to separate them. But right now, it's really this 5-HT2A receptor, this induction of hallucination. No one else is doing that. No other molecules out there do that as part of a treatment program."
"The issues with those classic psychedelics are, as you can imagine, they weren't designed as mental health treatment molecules. They came about for other reasons. And so they have a lot of side effects or safety issues that really make them suboptimal for patient use. So psychedelic-inspired says, let's take what we can learn from here. If you target the 5-HT2A receptor, you can induce some interesting effects in the patient, but can we then modify the molecules so they have better attributes?"
"And in doing so, we also realized we're breaking new ground. I mean, we're making hundreds and hundreds of new molecules in an area where a handful of molecules had existed before. Five molecules, ten molecules, is what everyone else has looked at. We realized we were in this completely new field, and we had to come up with a way to identify prospectively which of these new molecules were going to be likely good drug candidates for various mental health indications."
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