With a patent application, St. Joseph’s University lab looks to invent the future of psychedelic medications

Inside a laboratory at St. Joseph’s University, researchers think they have found a new drug that could shape the future of psychedelic therapy in health care. Or, really, more than 200 new drugs.

A newly filed patent application from the Discovery Center — a public-private collaboration working out of the university’s West Philadelphia lab space — hopes to lay claim to a new class of psychedelic compounds.

Lead chemist Jason Wallach is seeking approval to bring 218 novel psychedelic drugs to consumers, each of which could potentially treat a range of mental health conditions.

In the last decade, drugs such as MDMA, LSD, and psilocybin (the active chemical found in magic mushrooms) have shown promise in therapeutic settings. Through a guided psychedelic experience — sometimes called a “trip treatment”— patients are encouraged to confront and resolve deeply rooted psychological issues. Such drugs are being used in clinical trials to treat everything from end-of-life anxiety to PTSD.

“We can meet unmet medical needs,” Wallach said, speaking from his lab’s office. “How can we diagnose psychiatric conditions and help patients?”

Currently, most psychedelics are illegal in the United States under federal law, although certain exceptions are allowed, such as for those being tested in clinical trials. Ketamine, a legal drug with psychedelic-like effects used for general anesthesia, is increasingly being prescribed off-label to treat mental health conditions such as depression.

His patent application puts Philadelphia at the leading edge of a rapidly evolving medical frontier. Oregon and Colorado recently became the first states to legalize psilocybin therapy through public ballot measures. Just this month, Australia became the first nation in the world to legalize both psilocybin and MDMA.

But a patent application for a new drug — or 200-plus new drugs — is just a first step. Wallach and his team could be years away from a clinical trial to test how people respond to their drugs, with no clear timeline or guarantee for realizing their goal of making them available to consumers on pharmacy shelves.

Three years ago, the U.K.-based biotech company Compass Pathways came to Philadelphia with a mission. It paired up with a young chemist working at the University of the Sciences (now Saint Joseph’s University, following a 2022 merger) to chart a new partnership seeking to develop psychedelic therapeutics for mental health.

Magic mushrooms and LSD raise an issue for publicly traded companies such as Compass: They’re not proprietary. Because psilocybin abounds in nature, and because other psychedelics have long been in the public domain, they are difficult to own and sell.

These new compounds are not expected to receive the criticism raised when the company made an earlier attempt to patent a specific psilocybin, said Graham Pechenik, a lawyer based in San Francisco who monitors the psychedelics and cannabis industries.

“I can’t imagine any of the same controversies with this application,” Pechenik said

This new patent application covers a range of chemical compounds — and analogues, which are essentially tiny tweaks on the edges of a core chemical structure — classified as “fluorinated tryptamines.”

The tryptamine structure is shared by many known and popular psychedelics, including psilocybin and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT (a key psychoactive in the heady brew ayahuasca, consumed by Amazonian indigenous tribes and curious Western tourists alike).

The fluorination bit is where Wallach’s and his lab assistant Michael Dybek’s compounds get interesting.

The introduction of a fluorine compound to psychedelic drugs had been attempted before. Alexander Shulgin, the wildly prolific chemist who popularized MDMA in the mid-1970s, tried it. As did David E. Nichols, a veteran pharmacologist working out of Purdue University.

“Those were more or less dead ends,” Wallach said, explaining that fluorine essentially destroyed the psychedelic activity.

Key to this work is an investigation of what chemists call the “Structure-Activity Relationship,” or SAR, a process by which researchers tweak a chemical’s molecular structure, looking to examine the impact. Imagine taking a blueprint for a house, and then slanting the roof a bit, so that rain runs off more smoothly. It’s sort of like that, researchers say, but at a microscopic, molecular level.

By revising certain known tryptamine structures over and over again, and changing the placement of fluorine atoms, Wallach and Dybek say, they have found that fluoridation could actually increase psychedelic activity.

In lieu of human subjects, Wallach partners with another lab that administers the new compounds to mice. When administered a given compound, their head twitches serve as a barometer for psychedelic activity. Using this metric — called the head-twitch response, or HTR — the new compounds seem very promising.

Wallach, Dybek, and the team at Compass Pathways could still be years from clinical trials with human test subjects.

“What’s the next step? There’s about 812, last time I checked,” Steven Levine, a board-certified psychiatrist and vice president of patient access at Compass Pathways, said with a laugh.

Compass declined to provide any further detail on its projected timeline to bring these drugs to the market.

Bringing a new drug from the lab to the market can take as long as a decade. But advocates for psychedelic therapies hope to see the process for securing patents and conducting clinical trials for new drugs expedited.

That’s because these compounds are similar to psychedelics currently being tested. Some hope to piggyback on the safety and efficacy trial results of similar drugs. In 2022, the Biden administration took steps to expedite approvals for these therapies, with some news reports anticipating that treatments with MDMA and psilocybin could be legalized as soon as 2024.

The team at the Discovery Center is optimistic. After all, the legal and clinical landscape is changing rapidly. And until very recently, psychedelic chemistry was a by-and-large clandestine, illegal concern.

“Previously with this work,” Dybek said, “most people wouldn’t have even known about it, let alone explored it.”