Grant: Alliance Grants

This four year 2.1 million dollar project is part of a collaboration between Huxley Health and the Trant research lab at the University of Windsor jointly supported by NSERC and MITACS. Huxley Health is a new firm focused on realizing the benefits of psychedelics for the treatment of mental health, and is positioning itself as a global leader in the field as this use becomes increasingly deregulated and legalized. They are also focused on the health benefits of the non-psychoactive components of mushrooms. The Trant research lab is a biomedical research lab focusing on drug design and drug delivery. Psychedelics have a complicated reputation. Long used in traditional cultural practice, and then used recreationally, they have been extremely highly restricted for use or possession for much of the 20th century. However, new evidence demonstrating that they might prove useful for the treatment of mental illness, has renewed interest in exploring them. The hypothesis is that the altered state of mind they elicit renders the client more open to change and to progress. With many Canadians facing some form of mental illness or emotional distress, new mild therapies are very welcome. However, for this to be feasible, we require safe consistent dosing. Psychedelics are often still consumed in their raw form, but this has a problem of batch-to-batch reproducibility. Furthermore, it has the added challenge of differential uptake and metabolism in different people. Formulating the psychedelics, putting them in little nanopackages, can avoid these problems and give consistent doses. Furthermore, new formulating technologies can allow us to deliver the psychedelics straight to the brain. This allows us to greatly decrease the dose, and this will decrease side effects that can occur when the psychedelics act on proteins in the rest of the body. As each psychedelic molecule behaves differently, we need unique formulations for each, and for each mode of introduction, meaning we need to generate a library of formulations. This four-year project will support six graduate students, five postdocs, and two undergraduate students annually working in the labs in Windsor-Essex and continuing to attract the best talent to Canada.