Kathleen Gallagher: How a Madison area non-profit is accelerating demand for psychedelic mushrooms used to treat mental illness

In the summer of 2021, Usona Institute, a seven-year old non-profit co-founded by Promega head Bill Linton, broke ground on a 93,000 square foot building in the Madison suburb of Fitchburg.

When it opens in mid-2023, the facility will have a floating pool, sauna and steam room. There will be abundant space for management and oversight of clinical research and trials, therapeutic treatments and training classes for guides and facilitators. And everything will be surrounded by an extensively landscaped 17-acre campus including two residential cottages.

The driving force: Psychedelic mushrooms that increasingly are used in mental health care.

There hasn’t been a new treatment for depression in the more than 30 years since Prozac led the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) class of drugs to market in the late 1980s. But hallucinogenic compounds -- like psylocibin in so-called magic mushrooms -- may be the next better thing.

“When we can condense five years of psychotherapy into six hours that’s miraculous,” says Tim Schlidt, a Milwaukee native who is co-founder of Palo Santo, a $50 million, New York-based venture capital fund that invests exclusively in psychedelic therapeutics.

Hundreds of studies of psychedelics

There have been more than 1,000 studies in about 40,000 human subjects dating back to the 1960s into the potential that psychedelics have to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, anorexia, PTSD and other mental health disorders, Schlidt said.

At least six clinical trials over the last 15 years have shown that psylocibin caused impressive improvements in depressive symptoms, with some showing it worked better and had longer-lasting effects than SSRIs, according to an April 11 article in Nature Medicine, a premier scientific journal.

The excesses of the hippie hallucinogenic culture essentially caused the shutdown of research into psychedelics. Now we’re getting past the hippie thing -- fast.

More: Aaron Rodgers says taking ayahuasca helped improve mental health and spurred MVP seasons

Netflix this month introduced a new documentary, “How to Change Your Mind,” based on a book of the same name by Michael Pollan. Each of its four parts focuses on one psychedelic: LSD, psilocybin (mushrooms), MDMA (street names are Ecstasy, Molly) and mescaline (in certain cacti).

Denver became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin in 2019; since then 13 cities and counties, including several in Michigan, along with the entire state of Oregon have either decriminalized it or made it the lowest law enforcement priority.

The U.S. House of Representatives this month added a pair of amendments - from Reps. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY -- that would increase access to psychedelic treatments for veterans and active-duty service members with mental health conditions to the must-pass annual National Defense Authorization Act.

From Prozac to mushrooms

Nearly 30 years after featuring Prozac on its cover, Newsweek in 2021 highlighted magic mushrooms on its cover, saying they may be the next biggest advance in treating depression.

Usona has been a major force in helping to accelerate psylocibin research.

Knowing that research was constrained by limited supplies of a pharmaceutical-grade compound, Usona’s medicinal chemists found a more efficient process for synthesizing psilocybin. Then they published their process in a peer-reviewed scientific journal as an open access article, which meant people with the right expertise and resources could produce their own supplies for research -- a move consistent with Usona’s “open science” practice.

Usona also allows eligible researchers to apply to use its investigational drug supply in their approved clinical studies. The Institute has fulfilled or is considering more than 100 requests for investigational psilocybin by researchers from 14 countries.

MDMA (Ecstasy/Molly) is on track to be the first psychedelic drug approved by the FDA. It is being developed by the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which had extraordinary success in a Phase III clinical trial where more than two-thirds of participants with severe PTSD saw their symptoms diminish after three MDMA-assisted therapy sessions. The drug could be approved to be used therapeutically as soon as mid-2023.

Usona Institute is right behind, with a psilocybin therapeutic that could follow a year or two later. Both have gotten breakthrough therapy designations from the FDA, which means their therapies have shown preliminary results that demonstrate they may be significantly better for a serious condition than drugs on the market.

Growing demand for treatments

The demand for these new treatments is apparent. Usona has received interest from more than 15,000 people for its studies, says Tura Patterson, senior director of strategic partnerships.

Of course, these aren’t drugs you just pick up at the pharmacy and take home. That means there’s a lot of opportunity, not just for drug development, but for all the corresponding therapy and facilitating that goes along with guiding a patient through the experience. That's something Usona clearly understands in the vision for its new campus.

Development of psychedelic businesses is scattered, with the biggest clusters in cities like New York, London and Berlin, Schlidt says. So there’s still room for strong hubs to emerge.

Beyond Usona, the Midwest has been waking up to psychedelic medicine’s potential. UW-Madison and University of Michigan both started research centers for psychedelic drugs in 2021. Ohio State launched such a center earlier this year. University of Chicago has a leading researcher in the field in Harriet de Wit. And the Medical College of Wisconsin has one of the best serotonin-based pharmacology researchers in John McCorvy.

For most of us, memories slowly fade as the neural network we call our brain re-allocates its capacity toward processing contemporary information from our everyday lives. But in some cases, traumatic episodes such as parental abuse, serious accidental injuries, and combat experiences are so highly reinforced by emotions that the brain is unable to break the neural connections with the emotional centers that fuel the behavioral response.

We don’t yet know how they work but it seems that psychedelics somehow loosen and relieve the brain of such powerful connections. In short, psychedelics enable us to forget — a welcome relief for those who have suffered such trauma.

And an exciting opportunity for our region to coalesce its relevant resources around the groundwork Usona has laid and contribute to that relief.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Usona Institute focuses on psychedelic mushrooms to treat depression