UC Davis Used UV Light to Build a Hallucination-Free Psychedelic-Like Molecule
We just came across this one and thought it was worth surfacing, even though it's not fresh — the underlying paper published in JACS in late 2025, and UC Davis put out its own writeup on January 7, 2026. Chemists Joseph Beckett and Trey Brasher, working with professor Mark Mascal, used a photochemistry technique — fusing tryptamine to amino acids with ultraviolet light — to generate candidate molecules from a library of 100 computationally modeled compounds. One of them, labeled D5, fully activated the 5-HT2A receptor without producing the head-twitch response mice show in response to actual hallucinogens. Brasher called it "the discovery of a brand-new therapeutic scaffold" — a genuinely new chemical starting point, not a tweak on an existing psychedelic, if it holds up in further testing well beyond a mouse-model screen.
Read at UC Davis / Journal of the American Chemical Society