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Psychedelic Science 2025
174 Plays20 days ago
Joe reports back from the Psychedelic Science conference held recently again in Denver, Colorado. After some discussion about the conference, Joe speaks with Balasz Szigeti (who was on the podcast in 2023) about his recent work on the "Placebo Suppression Effect" in psychedelic research.
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Transcript
00:00:08
Speaker
Well, welcome, everyone. This is Cognation. I'm your host, Joe Hardy. And I'm Ralph Nelson. And on this episode, we have first of two parts that we're going to record about the Psychedelic Sciences Conference 2025 that took place in Denver, Colorado last week.
00:00:27
Speaker
that This is now the middle of June. and I attended the conference for about a day and a half and some interesting things came out of that so we're going to talk a bit about that and we also have an interview in this episode with Balash Taghetti who is a data scientist at the University of California San Francisco and he talks about some of his most recent work and that was recorded at the MAPS conference at Psychedelic Sciences.
00:00:59
Speaker
Just a warning up front, those there may be some audio issues with that just based on it being a live interview in the conference hall. But very interesting conversation and part of a ah larger conversation that we're engaging here around psychedelics, particularly as it relates to the science of psychedelics and and treatment.
00:01:21
Speaker
All right. So sounds like an interesting conference this year. Again, we reported on this stuff two years ago, too, when when Joe attended. So Joe, what was the vibe like at the conference?
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, the vibe, you know, was for the most part really positive, I would say. You know, people are really who attend psychedelic sciences. are really into psychedelics for the most part, as you might imagine. And they're excited about the research that's going on They're excited about the application for mental health and wellbeing that we're seeing with psychedelics in a variety of different use cases.
00:01:57
Speaker
But there was also some, I'd say it's a little bit more low energy than it was in 2023. Yeah. 2023 seemed to be a pretty big year for psychedelics, maybe hard to top. So Yeah, there was, there were a couple of negative news cycles that happened really recently related to psychedelics that kind of threw a little bit of a wet blanket on it.
00:02:18
Speaker
Yeah. So say, so maybe say a little something about those. Well, I think you saw that the article about some disappointing results from the FDA process regarding the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder using MDMA.
00:02:36
Speaker
So there was MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Want to get that get that correct? That's MAPS. And yeah, they were sponsoring a trial along with a industry sponsor as well.
00:02:51
Speaker
for using MDMA to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder. And they were hoping to get approval for that, actually for years now, from the FDA, and the expectation was that last year, 2024, would be the year.
00:03:07
Speaker
And they came out with some results that were positive, but the study was beset by some challenges, and ultimately they did not get approval from the FDA.
00:03:19
Speaker
At least at this stage. That slows things down a bit. yeah yeah and that i mean Specifically, that you know and this this came up certainly at the conference, rate which was that one of the challenges that they ran into was around ethics and some ethics violations that happened in the context of the study. In particular, um there was, you know, some inappropriate sexual contact between one of the therapists in the study and a patient, which obviously is a no-no. So, ah yeah, that kind of, that was a challenge and that was not initially reported in the way that
00:04:00
Speaker
that it should have been basically, but that was not ultimately I think the reason that the FDA didn't approve it this time around. I think there were some questions still about the design of the study and unblinding, functional unblinding.
00:04:14
Speaker
And that's actually gonna be the topic of you know the conversation that we have with Balesh is how you think about unblinding and placebo effects. But Rolf, do you wanna take a ah crack at what what unblinding means and and what, why it's relevant here in psychedelics.
00:04:31
Speaker
Yeah. So this is cool stuff. And this is again, someone who we talked to a couple of years ago and a very interesting guest, um, Balaj Sagedi. And, now he talks about how placebo effects may work in these kinds of psychedelic trials, right? So unblinding and, and,
00:04:51
Speaker
Generally, I guess when you think about placebo effects, um you're you're thinking that the person taking the treatment may not know which condition they're in.
00:05:02
Speaker
Right. So ideally, that's the theory and and in placebo controlled trials. The idea being that, right, you don't know which drug you're getting. And so whatever benefits you get from the drug are due to the drug and not due to some positive bias or expectancy effects.
00:05:20
Speaker
But then it sort of brings up the idea that if you're hit with a strong enough effect where it may be just obvious which condition you're in, um it may affect this this placebo effect. It may affect your expectations in a different sort of way.
00:05:35
Speaker
Exactly, yeah. And this is obvious in psychedelics and a big problem. mean, it's a general problem in mental health care when you talk about SSRIs or you talk about benzodiazepines, you know, anxiolytic drugs.
00:05:49
Speaker
Right. because it does have a psychological effect and the effect that you are measuring, you know. And so by almost definition, if it's effective, you will so you will notice it.
00:06:02
Speaker
You'll know that you are taking the drug. And so that's interesting. certainly some of these drugs too, especially taken over a longer course of time, like SSRIs like Prozac or something,
00:06:15
Speaker
um There may be subtle kinds of effects too that may be a little less. It's not hitting you over the head and you may sort of know wake up one day and feel a little different, but it's hard to attribute it necessarily to that that particular drug.
00:06:31
Speaker
Yeah. Versus psychedelics. If you go into the clinic and you're there for, say, a psilocybin journey, which is what the Compass Pathways study is about, or you know if it's MDMA, which is what the MAP study was about.
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah. Whether you've experienced or or not, you know. You're aware that you did or didn't get the drug, um you know particularly if you're in a you know moderate to high dose situation.
00:06:55
Speaker
And the interesting thing there is of course, well, there's unblinding. So if you had if you were positively inclined towards um psychedelics and you were interested in taking participating in a study because you wanted to take psychedelics, then the idea with the placebo effect has generally been that, well,
00:07:13
Speaker
you get some additional ah and fact efficacy from just your positive bias towards towards the medicine, right? So you wanted to take psychedelics, you did take psychedelics, you're happy about that, and you're gonna both feel better just overall because of these so-called placebo effects associated with that, but also you're going to ah report perhaps more positively as well. So you both of those things are are possibilities.
00:07:43
Speaker
And the idea with a placebo is if you don't know whether or not you're taking the drug, then you may get some of the benefits of positive expectancy and just general feeling like maybe I'm getting some benefit here and therefore just feeling better.
00:07:59
Speaker
But in psychedelics, you're sort of pretty well aware with high percentage, you can patients can indicate which group they were in. They're aware that they either had the psychedelic or they did not have the psychedelic.
00:08:11
Speaker
So this is called unblinding, functional unblinding. So while the therapist might not say, yes, you're in the treatment condition or, you know, no, you're in the in the control condition, you know it.
00:08:23
Speaker
ah Functionally, you've been unblinded from the from this study. And I guess one um one thing this relates to it are our earlier discussion from a few years ago about micro doses versus a lot of these studies, which are full on doses and micro doses, of course, you may not be aware of what condition you're in.
00:08:43
Speaker
In these full studies, it's a little different. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And then, of course, you know, this is Balash's earlier work. around microdosing he showed that you know along some of these measures for example depression measures or cognitive performance measures you don't see big differences between placebo effects and microdose of psilocybin for example when you truly don't know which one you're taking So this becomes a question and in the higher dose studies.
00:09:14
Speaker
And what Bosh and I will talk about in our interview is that there' there's potentially kind of interesting angle to this, which is that What he finds in his research and you know and and his colleagues, and you know I'm sure this will be an ongoing topic, and you know many people will different perspectives on it. So this is just his perspective and their their team's perspective, but it seems like it's coming from a well-reasoned place and with good data analysis, you know is that some of the differences that you're seeing in studies
00:09:53
Speaker
some of the between group differences that you're seeing in in these studies, you know now that comparing the treatment to the control, how much more benefit do you see in the treatment versus the placebo?
00:10:04
Speaker
those's That's the between effect, between subjects effect, between group effect. some of and then now we're talking about a difference of a difference of a difference, now we're comparing placebo versus psychedelic to placebo versus SSRI.
00:10:24
Speaker
And so in those studies, what they found, you know, is that you see that generally speaking, the psychedelic has a bigger difference in effect than SSRIs. You know, that hasn't been universally found, but there have been a number of studies indicating that there's a bigger difference for psychedelics versus SSRIs, not always statistically significant, but know, you see that.
00:10:47
Speaker
And then what he was showing there's a suppression of the placebo effect in a psychedelic trial. In other words, the control group improves less than you would expect based on control studies from SSRI, like with SSRIs, you actually see that the control arm improves less than you would expect.
00:11:13
Speaker
i guess okay I guess in this case what he's really saying is the difference is larger for psychedelic trials because there's a suppression of the placebo effect. Right, if you know if you know that you're clearly not taking the drug you don't receive that placebo effect.
00:11:30
Speaker
That's right and and and particularly What he's attributing this to is that people wanted to do psychedelics and they're disappointed in some sense that they didn't get a psychedelic. So they're actually getting a lower placebo effect than you would expect. Right. Okay. They just didn't know which one they were in.
00:11:49
Speaker
So positive expectations of effects play into it. Yeah, exactly. ah But yeah, I mean, so
00:11:59
Speaker
Otherwise, you know the the conference was was interesting. you know there It's an interesting conference. There are all kinds of different people attend the conference.
00:12:10
Speaker
You've got- Was it wasn't Aaron Rodgers there last time? Was he there this time? Is he still promoting this stuff? I didn't see Aaron Rodgers. i I'm sure there were some famous people there. I didn't see any famous people there this time.
00:12:24
Speaker
but Yeah, I mean, it's there. Oh, well, Jared Polis, who is ah phil you know affiliated with the conference in some way, was the governor of Colorado. Oh, okay, okay.
00:12:35
Speaker
He actually announced during the i don't know if he actually did this at the conference or was if it was a satellite event off site, but he announced that they would expunge convictions for psilocybin mushroom possession convictions.
00:12:52
Speaker
So know kind of like what they did with with cannabis, you know, a few years ago. Yeah, right. Colorado is sort of at the front of that stuff too. Yeah, exactly. So expunging the those those convictions.
00:13:04
Speaker
um So that was that was kind of interesting news that came out of it. Yeah, so there's there's people coming out different perspectives, people presenting science, like research, a lot of research panels. I saw some interesting research around the use of psychedelics in patients with life-threatening illnesses like cancer.
00:13:20
Speaker
Tony Bach is someone who works with, is a palliative care doctor who works with patients who are have severe cancers and have you know existential distress, anxiety and depression symptoms associated with that.
00:13:36
Speaker
And he presented some really interesting data and in ah in an open label study that showed you know benefits for those people that looked quite impressive.
00:13:50
Speaker
So a lot of interesting science, a lot of really interesting projects going on on that side. And then of course, lots of practitioners, therapists and others who treat people using psychedelics in different ways or work with people using psychedelics in different ways. um you know A lot of that like you know right now, ketamine is federally legal. So there's a lot of research, a lot of therapies, ketamine assisted therapies being conducted. So a lot of people who do that work were there then of course there's sort of the underground and gray area zone that people are associated with. So there's a lot of people who who participate and as therapists and guides and generally supporting integration in different ways.
00:14:33
Speaker
So, know, a mix of people and then just people, some people are just there because they like psychedelics, are interested in it. Some people just wanted to learn more. So it's an interesting crowd, interesting group. And yeah, as I say, generally it seemed like positive energy, but but somewhat muted compared to 2023. Yeah, so maybe we can get into the interview with Bosh.
00:14:55
Speaker
yeah know We're going to do another episode coming up soon. We don't want to announce it ahead of time and kate you know to ruin the surprise. But I think it's going to be a good one. And all right, cool.
00:15:18
Speaker
All right, Bosh Ligeti, welcome to Cognation. Thank you for having me again. Yeah, so you were on a couple years ago when we were here at the Psychedelic Sciences Conference in 2023. So now it's Psychedelic Sciences Conference 2025. And maybe you could tell the audience a little bit about yourself, your background, and what you do.
00:15:39
Speaker
Okay, sure. So it's a long story how I arrived at the space. I was originally working as a software engineer in academia, but then a few things happened, let's just put it that way, and I've decided to switch into psychedelic science.
00:15:53
Speaker
And initially I was with the Imperial College Group, but two years ago i yeah basically switched over to UCSF. I'm currently working as a data scientist for the Translational Psychedelic Research Group.
00:16:05
Speaker
So I do anything that has nothing to do with patient care, typically designing the trials, thinking about the structure, and then analyzing the data of when it's all said and done. Fantastic. Yeah, and so you've kind of made a name for yourself a little bit around couple of different things that I'm aware but I'm sure there's other stuff that you're working on now. But the two things that I'm particularly familiar with your your work around is thinking about placebo effects in psychedelics and then relating that to microdosing.
00:16:31
Speaker
Correct. So do you want to talk a little bit about... placebo effects in psychedelics and ah you know just thinking about is it possible to have a so you know a placebo for a psychedelic and and how does that fit into it? Yeah, sure. So the the latest of um you know the paper that's coming out, I'm gonna i'm going to walk you through that paper and that's going to touch ah on a lot of things. Perfect, perfect.
00:16:55
Speaker
But so like a lot of people talk about potentially like, you know, how positive expectancy biases have psychedelic trials, that there is an enhanced place so placebo effect.
00:17:06
Speaker
But when I actually look at the data, like I don't see evidence for that. However, what I see a lot of evidence for is that psychedelic trials have this like a placebo suppression effect.
00:17:17
Speaker
So last year there was a meta-analysis coming out. It's kind of like a sprawling paper where they calculated a lot of things. And one thing that they calculated is that the placebo response on average in traditional antidepressant trials is four points higher on the Hamilton depression rating scale, which is one of the standard measures of depression compared to the placebo response in psychedelic trials.
00:17:41
Speaker
And I don't think the authors realize that they have found something like very profound to understand psychedelic trial results. Because what I think most people don't realize is that the the standard metric that we use to evaluate drugs is something that's called the between arm difference, how much better ah the treatment did relative to placebo.
00:18:00
Speaker
And if you look at traditional antidepressants, they are always about two to three points higher than placebo, with psychedelics is six to seven points. So like, you know, that sounds really good. It's three times as high. So, you know, it that's that's the patient improvement.
00:18:14
Speaker
But that's not true because the patient improvement is not this between-arm effect. It's something that we are calling the within-treatment effect. What happens a lot with like the, or where like the efficacy of psychedelics is that basically because there is this much lower placebo response than the between our effect, how much better you did than the control.
00:18:32
Speaker
You're just getting artificially inflated because you're measuring it against a much lower floor. So to be specific, in traditional antidepressants, typically the placebo response is about 10 points on this Hamilton scale.
00:18:47
Speaker
And the between arm effect is about ah two to three points. And you know it averages out about to be 12 points on average. With psychedelic trials, the between arm effect is about six points, but the within control effect is also six points. So there is like this much lower placebo response rate in psychedelic studies. But if you look at the patient improvement, which is the sum of these two, it's actually the same as with traditional antidepressants.
00:19:14
Speaker
I know this is not going to be a popular finding with this conference, but it is what it is. And my latest paper is looking at this in a more formal manner where we are comparing open-label traditional antidepressants versus psychedelics. And the idea is really is that with psychedelics, the administration is always open-label, which is the technical term that we are telling the patient what they are going to get.
00:19:38
Speaker
But if psychedelics are always open-label, even if the trial is formally blinded, then it's only fair to compare them against other open-label interventions. So we compare open-label SSRIs versus psychedelic trials, and the patient improvement turns out to be remarkably similar across both of these interventions.
00:19:59
Speaker
Let me add quickly, that does not mean that psychedelics are not effective. I'm not claiming that they would be ah worse than SSRIs, but both of these are effective treatment. They are equally effective. So like you know it's stuff like two sides of the same coin because on one hand we showed that psychedelics are effective, but at least to me it felt a little disappointing that they don't just destroy SSRIs when it comes to ah patient improvement.
00:20:23
Speaker
Yeah, well that's a lot to unpack there. So taking a step back, so the first kind of key thing to understand is that in these trials you're comparing a drug, treatment drug, to a placebo.
00:20:38
Speaker
And the idea is that you're looking at the change over time from before the trial to after the trial on some measures. So in the case you're talking about a Hamilton depression scale.
00:20:49
Speaker
So You want to see is the improvement on the Hamilton depression scale greater for the treatment arm than it is for the placebo arm. That's the between arm effect. That's the traditional measure of success. Yeah. Now the challenge is that in psychedelics,
00:21:08
Speaker
the placebo is is compromised in a way because you know that you're not on a psychedelic when you're taking a placebo in a psychedelic trial whereas in a standard ssri trial you may actually not know although sometimes you can figure out that yeah because of some of the side effects and things here and more likely to say that you're in the treatment group if you are but it's much less of a problem. the unblinding, so-called unblinding, is less of a problem in the SSRI case than it is in the psychedelics case.
00:21:41
Speaker
It's like that New Yorker cartoon where you've got the guys dancing around and other people sitting on the couch saying, oh, we must be in the control group. And I think that's the reason for this placebo suppression effect that, like, let's step back and let's just be clear that and No patient wants to be in the placebo control in any treatment, in any trial.
00:22:02
Speaker
But with psychedelics, it's just much easier to figure that out because of this issue of functional blinding. And I think also the the psychedelic treatment model magnifies this issue because remember that these patients spend hours of psychotherapy preparing for life-changing, spiritual, ah inspiring, mystical journey. There is all that buildup.
00:22:23
Speaker
and then you know finally your spouse or a friend drives you to the clinic you take that capsule and nothing happens i i know i would be disappointed right sure so i think you know this effect is naturally occurring but because of the functional blinding it's very obvious and because of the treatment model it's it's magnified there are actually some psychedelic trials where patients in the placebo arms get worse, which is completely unique to psychedelics. At this point in my life, I looked at results from hundreds of depression trials across many, many interventions.
00:22:56
Speaker
And the placebo response is always a moderate to a large effect, and it's always in the direction of improvement. In psychedelic studies, sometimes patient gets worse, and that's completely unique to psychedelics.
00:23:07
Speaker
And as I mentioned, there was that meta-analysis before that they showed that it is about four points difference on the Hamilton scale, which is like, you know, the the total treatment effect is about 12 points with these medications. Like, you know, four points, that's one third of it. That's not an insignificant portion.
00:23:22
Speaker
Not at all. Not at all. that's And that's really interesting. That's not at all what I would have expected. But now that you tell me about it, it makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I think you know it is one of those things where everybody is obsessed with the between arm difference, including the FDA. That's like the only metric that they are looking at.
00:23:39
Speaker
But I think it's weird because that's not a patient improvement. And call me crazy, but if you want to help patients, maybe patient improvement is something that we are considering.
00:23:50
Speaker
Like if I'm telling you that the bit between arm difference, let's say was three points, let's just stick with the Hamilton depression scale. Let's say I'm telling you that it's three points. Like you would not know what was the patient improvement because it could have been that the effect in the control arm was let's say 15 points. So 15 plus three, 18 points total improvement. That's great.
00:24:09
Speaker
But it also could be the case that the viewing control effect size was, let's say, 5 points. 5.3 is 8 points. You know, it's not so exciting. And this is going on to the degree, which I just really don't understand, that most trials do not even report patient improvement.
00:24:25
Speaker
So one of the examples that I like to say is the Cipriani meta-analysis of traditional antidepressants. It's the most comprehensive meta-analysis of traditional antidepressants. And you know at this point, it's hundreds of trials. like Putting together that paper was probably thousands of hours you would not know what was the patient improvement reading that paper. They did not bother to calculate that.
00:24:48
Speaker
Now, let me be clear. I do think you know that like the between-arm difference tells you something important. like I'm not saying you know just to forget about that, but I kind of feel that you should also put next to it how much the patients improved. is The whole enterprise is about trying to help patients.
00:25:02
Speaker
Absolutely, absolutely. So then you were looking, in in your most recent paper, you were looking at open-label studies, so where the studies were actually open-label. In other words, everyone was told exactly what they were getting. So it wasn't a placebo-controlled trial.
00:25:14
Speaker
And he thought that is actually like a better comparison in some ways because the functional unblinding is not a problem. So you basically, you're just unblinding both groups. It's an apples-to-apples comparison that way. Right.
00:25:27
Speaker
And so you can kind of make some statements about, um you know, the relative efficacy across trials in those. And you saw in that that there was not a superiority of psychedelics over SSRIs, but not inferiority either. But here's the thing which I learned doing that study is that actually what made the difference is not that we looked at open-label SSRIs versus psychedelics.
00:25:49
Speaker
What made the difference is that we looked at this within treatment effect size. So how much was the patient improvement? Traditionally, all meta-analyses would just look at the between-arm effect size.
00:26:00
Speaker
If you calculated the within treatment effect size, so how much was the patient improvement in blinded SSR trials versus open label SSR trials, there is a difference about one to one to five point, depending on how exactly you set up your analysis.
00:26:16
Speaker
But that's not a great difference. It turns out where there is a difference is this placebo suppression effect. And like because we use the open label comparison, like that's the only thing that we could compare. So like you know in a sense, in accidentally, you know we stumbled into this realization that what happens is not that you know that with SSRIs, if you do the open label comparison, then they catch up because then it's unblinded. That actually it accounts for a very little part of the difference.
00:26:43
Speaker
But the difference is is this that this comparison eliminates that placebo suppression effect from the results of psychedelic trials. That's really interesting. So it's kind of like, ah you know, maybe we we did the right thing for the wrong reason. And, you know, it just sort of like worked out in the end.
00:26:58
Speaker
So where do you think this goes from there? Where are you taking this research? um I would love to do, so one thing that I would just like to emphasize here is that, you yeah What we did in this paper is just comparison of these core depression measures. And I think there are a lot of other parameters that ah matter to patients. For example, the frequency of the dosing, the frequency and severity of the side effects, the durability of the response, so on and so on.
00:27:26
Speaker
And I would love to do like a more comprehensive analysi analysis that um also consider some of these factors. But it's really, really challenging because the way a lot of the data is collected is just not standardized. So then you know it's it's just then hard to hard to do um a fair comparison.
00:27:43
Speaker
um I talk a lot about nowadays, including at my ah talk today here at the Psychedelic Science Conference, that there is something called the Zeland design. And the Zeland design is a non-traditional RCT design where what happens is that basically you flip the order of consent and randomization.
00:28:00
Speaker
And what's really cool about that is that... So but actually, let me walk through the the listeners because I want to build up. So in a traditional RCT, you recruit your patients and then you reveal some information about the trial.
00:28:15
Speaker
And then if they decide to consent, you randomize them. But you reveal some information about the trial, typically like the number of arms and something about the conditions, not everything, but they know the big picture.
00:28:26
Speaker
In a Zelen trial, as soon as the patient contacts you, you are randomizing them to one of the arms. And when you're communicating with the patient, you are pretending as if this would be a single arm trial of the given intervention.
00:28:39
Speaker
Here is why is that cool? Because you never told the patients that there is a potential other arm in the study. The best way to eliminate this disappointment effect in the control control arm is to basically pretend towards the patients that there is no other treatment that could have been available to them.
00:28:56
Speaker
So, like, you know, design-design is an interesting twist that can potentially eliminate this placebo suppression effect that I think distorts psychedelic trial results.
00:29:08
Speaker
Interesting. Yeah, that's very interesting. Is your thinking changed about the microdosing work now that you've found this placebo suppression effect? I mean, like, you know, I always had, like, mixed feelings about my own work in microdosing, because the thing is, is that, you know, when we published that paper in 2021, you know, everybody was just like, oh, like, they did not find the difference between placebo and microdosing. And, like, you know, by and large, I must say that since then, traditional RCTs have, by and large, reproduced those results, and everybody was focusing on that.
00:29:40
Speaker
And I always emphasize the other side of the coin, but there was definitely improvement in the microdosing arm. So like, you know, microdosing not being better than placebo, that does not mean that microdosing is worth less. It just means that you are, it like it does not induce larger effects than an already large effect.
00:29:58
Speaker
Right. Like, you know, that's not nothing. So this is something that I always like wrestled with and, you know, to communicate it clearly. But I think, you know, especially for people who are like, you know, professional scientists, like everybody's always just talking about the BPMNR effect without like really like thinking about that, you know, what are the other effect sizes, like the within treatment effect of a treatment.
00:30:20
Speaker
And think, you know, it is just like, it's just one of the things where you have to be nuanced that, yes, microdosing is not more effective than placebo. That does not mean that microdosing is not effective. And, you know, obviously get asked the lot a lot about, hey, should I be microdosing? And I'm always like, if you believe in it, yes, and just don't read my papers.
00:30:37
Speaker
Yeah, perfect. It'll definitely work then. Yeah. Yeah. yeah Awesome. Yeah, so you know in terms of ah what you're seeing at the conference here, is there anything that you're finding particularly interesting besides you know the stuff we've been talking about?
00:30:51
Speaker
I mean, one thing that's very noticeable compared to ah last time we were here is that it's much smaller. i i mean, I would say it's like 30% less people, and I think that's very noticeable.
00:31:02
Speaker
I do feel like that the FDA's rejection of MDMA last summer, that... kind of a wet blanket. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and like, you know, it, you talk a lot about like, you the hype cycle with psychedelics, maybe that 2023 conference was the peak of it.
00:31:20
Speaker
And, you know, right now, because we are coming down from the peak of that type cycle, maybe we can have different conversations. And, I personally feel that somebody who is a psychedelic researcher but has a little bit more of a critical angle on these things, as it's obvious from these conversations. I'm not the psychedelic zealot that psychedelics are going to heal everything all the time.
00:31:40
Speaker
And I feel that, you know, I've never been a popular figure in psychedelic science because of my findings, but I definitely feel that more people are receptive to what I'm talking about than two years ago. Two years ago, I was just a villain.
00:31:55
Speaker
Right now, you know I'm still a villain, but like you know there is more acknowledgement that this guy may have a point. right Where do you see your research going next? what are you really excited about going forward? So right now at UCSF, we have an exciting flagship trial of psilocybin for Parkinson's disease. And it's a phase two study with like a proper control condition. Have to be really careful not to reveal anything about the trial, but that's ah a cool large study where there's going to be a second site also at Yale.
00:32:26
Speaker
And overall, we are hoping to recruit 100 patients. So like, you know, in the realm of psychedelic trials, that is definitely a big one. And also it's just that is a Parkinson's disease. That's just a completely different realm compared to yet another psilocybin for depression trial. So I think, you know, that's just like an exciting new frontier in in psychedelic medicine.
00:32:46
Speaker
Obviously, I'm a little bit biased here because I'm involved in this trial, but that's something that I think is genuinely cool. And i you know I think the other thing that we have to acknowledge here is that Compass Pathways is about to release their phase three trial data.
00:33:02
Speaker
It is after that initial setback that broke the momentum. It's important you know to regain momentum and psilocybin heading to like a successful phase three, like, you know, readout of the results heading towards FDA submission could could correct the ship.
00:33:16
Speaker
So, you know, fingers crossed. Interesting. All right. Well, Bosh, thank you so much for being on the show again. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome.
00:33:31
Speaker
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00:33:42
Speaker
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00:33:55
Speaker
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