Scientists Turned Toad Venom Into a Nasal Spray to Fight Depression. But Does It Work?
· Vice
Maybe you’ve heard about psilocybin therapies wherein the psychedelic drug is prescribed to treat PTSD and severe depression. Well, researchers have been hard at work on something similar but with psychedelic toad venom.
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The stuffy, cleanliness-obsessed medical world probably won’t ask you to pick up a toad you can lick from your CVS pharmacist, so researchers who published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association say they’ve found a way to turn that depression-treating toad venom into an easy-to-use nasal spray.
5-MeO-DMT is a psychedelic derived from the Sonoran Desert toad. In a phase 2b trial involving 193 patients across the US, Europe, and Australia, researchers tested a synthetic version called mebufotenin benzoate. The study focused on patients with treatment-resistant depression, a condition affecting at least 30 percent of depressed individuals who seek to be impervious to the effects of antidepressants.
Scientists Are Testing a Toad Venom-Inspired Nasal Spray for Depression, and It Might Actually Work
The real benefit of a nasal spray, beyond convenience, is its speed. It’s a quick delivery system that goes right into your bloodstream, and the toad-derived spray lets most patients trip, recover, and get discharged within two hours. Yes, discharged, as it will have to do the therapy at a designated location while being observed because you will be high. But instead of the 6- to 12-hour vision quest you’ll go on when you drop acid. It’s an efficient trip that gets you back out in the world in two hours, with a little less depression.
A single dose of eight milligrams or 12 milligrams significantly reduced depressive symptoms over eight weeks, with remission rates reaching up to 26 percent at the one-month mark. It’s not a perfect system, and some kinks are going to need to be worked out, like how most participants reported mild side effects like nausea, headache, nasal pain, and one participant had severe panic attacks.
There’s also the fact that, according to psychopharmacology researcher Chittaranjan Andrade, who wrote an opinion piece based on the research, the average patient only became about 30 percent better, which some would probably take no matter what, but those are rates below what we see “with ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy,” according to Andrade.
Despite the concerns, the drug is still headed to Phase 3 trials.
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