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Brief, sourced updates — summarized in our own words, linked back to where they came from.
The Army dosed 7,000 soldiers with psychedelics they weren't told they were taking, decades before Schedule I ended the program. We mapped where MDMA, psilocybin, ibogaine, ketamine, and LSD actually stand across the VA and Pentagon today — this time by consent. Read it here.
Read at AltitudeLSD has the smallest patent footprint of any compound in our tracker — 14 granted, 34 pending — and Roche's five grants turn out to be drug-testing patents, not therapeutics. Definium, the company closest to an actual approval, holds just one. Read the full breakdown here.
Read at AltitudeWe missed this one when it happened back on July 22 — bubbling it up now because it's more consequential than the news cycle at the time gave it credit for. The House passed its version of the FY2027 defense authorization bill, 216-212, carrying two psychedelics amendments: one extends the Pentagon's psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine, and 5-MeO-DMT research program for PTSD/TBI in active-duty service members from a 3-year window to 2033, the other codifies Trump's April 2025 psychedelics executive order into law and requires the VA to name an official within 90 days to coordinate psychedelic-therapy access across agencies. Ten co-sponsors, split roughly evenly R/D, led by Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX). It still needs the Senate, which hadn't acted on it as of this writing — this is House passage, not final law.
Read at Marijuana Moment5-MeO-DMT has 164 patents in play across our tracker, and Turtle Bear Holdings and Beckley Psytech hold the most — but the company with the strongest clinical data, GH Research, holds almost none of them. We dug into what that split says about how differently these companies are betting on the same compound. Read the full breakdown here.
Read at AltitudePsilocybin leads every compound in our patent tracker on combined activity, and four holders — COMPASS Pathways, Enveric Biosciences, Turtle Bear Holdings, and CaaMTech — account for most of the granted patents between them. We dug into what each is actually claiming, why one nonprofit running an FDA-vouchered trial holds zero patents on purpose, and how Compass survived a million-dollar legal challenge to keep its patents alive. Read the full breakdown here.
Read at AltitudeThe Times ran a broad explainer on treatment-resistant depression — roughly defined as not improving by half after two different antidepressants, which describes an estimated 31% of people treated for depression in the US. Yale's Gerard Sanacora and UC Davis's Debra Kahn walk through what's tried next: TMS (patients on TMS plus an antidepressant were 2.8x as likely to reach remission as sham TMS plus antidepressant, per a 2023 meta-analysis of 19 trials), esketamine/Spravato (52.5% response vs. about 31% on placebo in its approval trial), lithium, and combination approaches. Psilocybin, ibogaine, and 5-MeO-DMT get one line — "also being studied" — which is a useful reminder of where psychedelics actually sit in mainstream medical coverage right now: a footnote to ketamine and neuromodulation, not yet a headline treatment.
Read at The New York TimesNormal antibodies are too large to get inside a cell, which rules them out against disease-causing proteins that never leave the cytoplasm — a real problem for neurodegenerative disease, where a lot of the damage happens intracellularly. A University of Essex team used AI to redesign 672 existing antibodies into "intrabodies," small enough to fold correctly and function inside human cells, targeting proteins implicated in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and motor neurone disease. Published in Nature Communications. It's a platform result, not a treatment — no human dosing data exists yet — but combined with gene-therapy delivery methods, it's a real answer to a targeting problem that's mostly kept intracellular disease proteins out of reach.
Read at University of Essex / Nature CommunicationsMonash University's Turner Institute gave 62 healthy adults psilocybin under four different conditions — resting, meditating, listening to music, watching a film — while scanning their brains, the largest single-site imaging study yet of psilocybin's acute effects. Brain networks that normally keep "inner world" and "outer world" processing distinct blurred together under the drug, but the specific shape of that blurring tracked whatever the person was actually doing at the time, and stronger reorganization correlated with more positive, less isolating experiences. It's healthy volunteers, not a depression trial, but it's a real mechanistic case for something clinicians already suspected: the setting during a session isn't incidental to psilocybin therapy, it's part of how the therapy works.
Read at NatureWe missed this one when it published back on July 9 — bubbling it up now because it's a real step, not just a bill filing. State Rep. Marjorie Decker's five-year pilot program cleared the Massachusetts House, folded into a $561 million economic development bill: up to three DPH-licensed mental health clinics would be allowed to administer psilocybin or ibogaine on-site under medical supervision for PTSD, addiction, and depression, with cannabis companies, pharmaceutical companies, and psychedelic-molecule developers explicitly barred from holding a license. It still needs Senate approval and Governor Healey's signature, so it isn't law — and it's notably narrower than the broader legalization ballot measure Massachusetts voters rejected in 2024, built instead around licensed clinics rather than open access.
Read at The Boston GlobeA Harvard team led by Paola Arlotta, with lead authors Irene Faravelli and Noelia Antón-Bolaños, sustained lab-grown human brain organoids for more than five years — three times the previous 694-day record set by UCLA and Stanford researchers in 2021. Each organoid grew past a million cerebral cortex cells and appears to retain a molecular record of its own developmental age: when the team combined older and younger cells in one organoid, the older cells jumped ahead and produced the more mature neuron types they were developmentally due to make months before the younger cells reached the same point, apparently through DNA methylation acting as an internal clock. It's a real answer to a practical problem — organoids have generally died before diseases like Alzheimer's have time to develop in them — more than it's progress toward "organoid intelligence," whatever else gets written about it elsewhere.
Read at Harvard University / NatureThe University of Miami handed its original 1994 ibogaine Investigational New Drug application over to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which President Trump framed as accelerating ibogaine's path toward federal research and, eventually, veteran access. An IND is the foundational filing that lets researchers legally study a drug in humans — a three-decade-old one on file could shortcut groundwork any new ibogaine program would otherwise have to redo from scratch. It's the latest follow-through on Trump's April executive order directing $50 million toward psychedelic research: the VA now runs more than 20 active psychedelic-related studies, and VA and HHS signed a cooperation MOU on this exact area back in July. Ibogaine itself remains Schedule I and unapproved for any use.
Read at NewsweekResearchers from Bendable Therapy, Osmind, and UCSF — including psychedelic-neuroscience researcher Robin Carhart-Harris — tracked 88 people who went through Oregon's state-licensed psilocybin services between March 2024 and April 2025, outside any clinical trial. Depression, anxiety, and well-being all improved significantly 30 days after a session, holding up even among the nearly half of participants already taking psychiatric medication. Two people reported lingering visual aftereffects a day out that had resolved by 30 days; three reported psychological aftereffects at 30 days. It's naturalistic, with no control group and a small, self-selected sample — nearly half the participants traveled in from out of state — so it's not a substitute for a randomized trial, but it's an early read on whether Oregon's legal program is producing outcomes anywhere near what's shown up in clinical settings.
Read at medRxiv (preprint, not yet peer-reviewed)We pulled every patent we could find across seven compounds — psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, ketamine, ibogaine, DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT — and mapped who's filing, what they're claiming to treat, and where the FDA has already said no. Read the full breakdown here, or dig into the company-by-company data yourself on Altitude Intelligence.
Read at AltitudeMindMed renamed itself Definium Therapeutics, Inc. (NASDAQ: DFTX) in January, and its LSD compound went from MM120 to DT120 in the same move. This week, the company reported positive Phase 3 results from Voyage, its lead trial for generalized anxiety disorder — meeting the primary endpoint with a strong effect size. A second GAD trial and an already-positive depression trial are also underway. Right now, this is the most advanced LSD program in clinical development, by a wide margin.
Read at BioSpace / Definium TherapeuticsHB26-1325 took effect this month, creating a state-run ibogaine research pilot inside Colorado's Behavioral Health Administration — up to five sites studying ibogaine for PTSD, opioid use disorder, and other conditions, building on the state's 2022 Natural Medicine Health Act. It requires mandated cardiac screening and medical oversight (ibogaine carries a real, well-documented arrhythmia risk), coordination with the FDA's IND process, and a benefit-sharing requirement with Indigenous communities historically associated with iboga. This is a research pilot, not legalization — no sites have been picked yet, and ibogaine remains Schedule I federally.
Read at Colorado General AssemblyResilient Pharmaceuticals — the company formerly known as Lykos, and before that MAPS PBC — has quietly resubmitted its New Drug Application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, roughly two years after the FDA's August 2024 rejection. No new Phase 3 trial this time: the filing reportedly leans on a small VA follow-up study, a new cardiac-safety study in healthy volunteers, and an audit of the original trial data addressing the unreported-adverse-events problem that helped sink it the first time. MAPS itself says it has no active role in the filing now. Worth flagging: Resilient hasn't confirmed the resubmission publicly — this is trade reporting citing people familiar with the filing, not a company statement. I go deeper on what this means for the wider patent and regulatory picture here.
Read at MAPSEstonian researchers proposed a unifying mechanism for how serotonergic psychedelics work at the cellular level: 5-HT2A agonism on the apical dendrites of layer V pyramidal neurons — a specific class of cortical cells — loosens the usual boundaries around a thought or perception, letting it bleed into surrounding context more than it normally would. They're calling it "apical hypercontextualization," and the pitch is that it could explain the felt sense of interconnectedness that shows up across different psychedelics. Worth being clear about what this actually is: a theoretical framework built to organize existing findings, not a new experiment with its own data. It's a hypothesis for the field to test, not a result.
Read at Neuroscience & Biobehavioral ReviewsThe VA just registered PIVOT, a 240-person randomized trial testing psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression in veterans, including those carrying PTSD alongside it. It hasn't started recruiting yet, and primary completion isn't expected until 2030, so this is a marker to watch, not a result. But a study this size, from the VA itself, is a signal in its own right.
Read at VA Office of Research and DevelopmentPsiDeR, led by Professor James Rucker at King's College London and delivered through South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, is the UK's first publicly funded randomized trial of psilocybin therapy — funded by the NIHR, 60 patients with treatment-resistant depression, a single 25mg dose against a true placebo, with psychological support given to both arms. Published in Nature Medicine: 43% of the psilocybin group met response criteria at 3 weeks versus 3% on placebo, with 40% in remission, and both figures held at 6 weeks. The other detail worth noting: it was delivered in community NHS settings rather than a specialist research unit, which is as much a feasibility result as an efficacy one for a public health system weighing whether this could ever work outside a trial.
Read at King's College London / Nature MedicineQuipazine is an old psychedelic that relieves depression-like symptoms in animal studies but also triggers nausea, because it activates a serotonin receptor in the gut (5-HT3) along with the one in the brain that does the therapeutic work (5-HT2A). Virginia Commonwealth University researchers redesigned the molecule into VCU-1012, engineered to hit the brain receptor selectively while leaving the gut one alone. In mice, it produced the same antidepressant- and anxiety-reducing effects as quipazine, plus more dendritic growth in the frontal cortex, without the GI symptoms. It's mice, not people, and there's no human safety or dosing data yet — but it's a concrete example of designing out a psychedelic's side effect without designing out the mechanism that makes it work.
Read at Science SignalingSB 43 became law on August 1 without Governor Jeff Landry's signature, after passing both chambers unanimously in May. It creates a psychedelic-assisted therapy pilot inside the Louisiana Department of Health, funded by the roughly $600 million the state is due through 2038 from opioid settlement payouts — money extracted from the companies that helped cause the crisis, redirected toward trials of psilocybin, ibogaine, and MDMA for opioid use disorder and co-occurring conditions. Any studies still have to clear the FDA's investigational drug process and get DEA Schedule I permits like anyone else's would. If a drug developed through the program is ever approved, the state gets a 20% cut of the profits — a funding model we haven't seen elsewhere in this space.
Read at Marijuana MomentTwelve veterans with severe, treatment-resistant PTSD went through psilocybin-assisted therapy in an Ohio State-led pilot. A month later, nine of them — 75% — were in remission, PTSD scores dropped by an average of 27.5 points, and there were no serious adverse events. It's tiny and open-label, with no placebo arm, so treat it as encouraging, not proof. And to be clear: this isn't the same study as PIVOT above — different sponsor, different size, different primary target.
Read at Communications Medicine / Ohio State UniversityCybin rebranded to Helus Pharma Inc. (NASDAQ: HELP) in January, moved its US listing to Nasdaq, and renamed its lead compound from CYB003 to HLP003 — same deuterated psilocin, new name. The company just finished enrolling its pivotal Phase 3 trial, APPROACH, ahead of schedule: 223 participants testing HLP003 as an add-on to standard antidepressants for major depressive disorder. Topline data is expected by year-end.
Read at PR Newswire / Helus PharmaUC San Diego has an open trial giving psilocybin-assisted therapy to its own physicians dealing with burnout, tracking outcomes on the Stanford Professional Fulfillment Index. It's Phase 1/2, feasibility-and-safety stage, not proof the treatment works for burnout specifically. But it's a notable shift in who's being studied — not just depression or PTSD patients, but the clinicians treating them.
Read at ClinicalTrials.govThe FDA confirmed a public hearing, "Considerations for Potential Future Therapeutic Use of Psychedelic Drugs," for September 14, 2026, gathering input on therapeutic use in supervised settings. The announcement itself is from mid-July, but it's news to us and the deadline to request to present is genuinely urgent: August 21, 2026, with written comments open through October 5. One more marker in a busier-than-usual year for the agency on this compound class.
Read at FDACompass Pathways plc (NASDAQ: CMPS) followed its February COMP006 primary-endpoint announcement with 26-week durability data: the benefit from a single 25mg psilocybin dose largely held through six months, and patients who relapsed and got a second dose improved further — nearly 30% of early responders reached remission on retreatment. That's company-reported, ahead of peer review, about one formulation in one trial. Not a verdict on psilocybin generally.
Read at Compass PathwaysA new Stanford trial, SPACE, will give psilocybin to people under general anesthesia — masking the subjective experience entirely — while tracking brain activity on EEG. It's small, ten participants, and hasn't started recruiting. But it's aimed at the field's open question: how much of psilocybin's effect depends on the trip itself, versus what's happening in the brain underneath it.
Read at ClinicalTrials.govA new UCSF study gave 28 healthy volunteers — no depression, no prior psychedelic experience — a single 25mg dose of psilocybin and tracked their brains for a month after. EEG showed a spike in signal entropy within hours, and structural scans still showed changes a month out, with the biggest short-term entropy spikes predicting the most reported insight and well-being later. Worth naming plainly: this is healthy volunteers, not a depression trial — durable brain change correlating with subjective benefit, not proof of a clinical effect.
Read at UCSFUNC's psilocybin-assisted therapy pilot for treatment-resistant depression has finished enrolling its 20 participants and completed its main treatment phase, with full data collection expected by March 2027. It's a small pilot, not a Phase 3 trial. But it's one more sign this kind of institutional research is now running everywhere at once — the VA, Stanford, and UNC, all in parallel.
Read at ClinicalTrials.govKevin Ryan's AlleyCorp helped found Transcend Therapeutics in 2021 to develop methylone — an MDMA analog — for PTSD. In March, Otsuka Holdings (TSE: 4578) agreed to buy it for $700 million upfront plus up to $525 million in milestones, a deal that closed in June. TSND-201, Transcend's lead compound, is the same one that picked up an FDA National Priority Voucher back in April — the fast-track program I wrote about here. It's Otsuka's second psychedelic-adjacent bet in three years, after its 2023 acquisition of Mindset Pharma.
Read at Otsuka PharmaceuticalMice put through weeks of unpredictable stress lost interest in sugar water — a standard proxy for anhedonia — and got worse at maze tasks. A single dose of DMT reversed both, and the researchers traced it to new neuron growth in the hippocampus. It's mice, not people, and a sugar-water test isn't the same as a life. But it's one more data point that psychedelics may work partly by regrowing brain cells, not just adjusting mood chemically.
Read at Translational PsychiatryCortical Labs' CL1 — 200,000 living human neurons grown on a microelectrode array — learned to play Doom earlier this year. In March, the company wired the neurons into a large language model so the cells' firing patterns help select the model's output. It's an early, strange proof of concept for hybrid biological-digital computing, not a sentient chip. But it's real, and it's moving fast.
Read at Tom's HardwareOxford researchers gave mice 5-MeO-DMT and found something odd: the animals stayed behaviorally active, with dilated pupils and normal muscle tone, while their brains showed the slow-wave activity you'd expect from sleep — a dissociated state that doesn't fit neatly into "awake" or "asleep." It's mice, not the felt experience of a Bufo session, but it's a real physiological signature for what the compound does to a brain in real time.
Read at Communications BiologyGH Research PLC's (NASDAQ: GHRS) GH001 — inhaled, synthetic 5-MeO-DMT — posted some of the strongest Phase 2b data in the field for treatment-resistant depression: 57.5% of patients in remission within a week, 73% still in remission at six months. In January, the FDA lifted a clinical hold on the drug's IND, clearing the way for a global Phase 3 program. As of now, the company hasn't confirmed the trial has actually started enrolling.
Read at GlobeNewswire / GH ResearchAs brain organoids get more sophisticated, a new AJOB Neuroscience paper takes on a question that's about to matter more: when an organoid learns a task, is that intelligence, or is it something closer to felt experience? The paper argues those are different questions with different ethical stakes, and that electrical complexity or learning behavior alone doesn't settle either one. Worth watching as the organoid-AI field moves faster than the ethics conversation around it.
Read at AJOB NeuroscienceMindBio Therapeutics Corp.'s (CSE: MBIO) take-home, self-titrated microdose LSD looked strong in an open-label Phase 2a study — a 65% symptom reduction. But the controlled Phase 2b, 89 patients tested against an active placebo at the University of Auckland, didn't separate from placebo at all. Worth sitting with: open-label results are the least reliable kind, and a real control arm is where a lot of psychedelic optimism goes to get tested.
Read at MindBio TherapeuticsGermany's federal drug regulator, BfArM, approved what's reportedly the EU's first compassionate-use program for psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression — inpatient-only, at two sites in Mannheim and Berlin, using a botanical psilocybin candidate alongside psychotherapy. Capacity is small, roughly 50 patients in the first year, and compassionate use isn't approval — it's a narrow, case-by-case pathway for patients who've exhausted other options. Still, it's a real crack in the EU's otherwise cautious regulatory posture.
Read at Central Institute of Mental Health, MannheimBeckley Psytech's Phase IIa data on BPL-003 — intranasal synthetic 5-MeO-DMT — showed a 55% response rate the day after dosing, sustained through day 85, in patients still taking an SSRI. That's notable because SSRIs are known to blunt psychedelics by downregulating the exact receptor they work through — I wrote about that interaction here on Altitude — so a signal this strong on top of one is worth watching. Side effects were mild: nasal discomfort, nausea, headache, no serious adverse events.
Read at Beckley PsytechA placebo-controlled Phase 1 trial gave 36 adults with depression or anxiety weekly sublingual microdoses of 5-MeO-DMT — 6, 9, or 12mg — for four weeks. No serious adverse events, no organ toxicity, and no one reported an actual psychedelic effect at these doses. It's a safety study, not an efficacy one, but it's the groundwork any microdosing claim about this compound needs before it means anything clinically.
Read at Neuropsychopharmacology