A San Francisco-based biotech company, backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, has won government approval to begin clinical trials of a new “safer MDMA”.
The company, Arcadia Medicine, which is developing psychoactive drugs to treat mental health disorders, could deliver early-stage clinical trial results within a year.
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the company’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for its drug, known as AM1002, for which the firm already holds a patent and has secured significant backing from Altman as well as Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and Dylan Field, billionaire founder of graphics firm Figma.
"Arcadia’s innovative work in developing a safer form of MDMA is an important step towards a potentially transformative psychiatric treatment,” Altman said.
The new drug falls into a class of drugs sometimes known as “empathogens” – the same as existing MDMA, which was first synthesized in 1912, and has become widely known as ecstasy in pill form or molly in crystal form. Empathogens are psychoactive drugs that promote feelings of emotional closeness, empathy, and connectedness.
However, besides the risk of illegally-sold MDMA being cut with other, potentially dangerous substances, side effects of MDMA can include overheating, high heart rate, and dehydration.
Arcadia’s website claims their new formulation has been “developed to be non-neurotoxic, reduce hyperthermia, and have few cardiovascular side effects,” suggesting traditional MDMA risks could be reduced.
“At Arcadia, we’re creating an improved version of MDMA by redesigning the molecule to have an enhanced safety profile and a more targeted therapeutic effect, and this IND is a testament to our progress,” Nikita Obidin, founder and CEO of Arcadia Medicine, said in a statement.
“We plan to initiate a clinical trial of AM-1002 in Generalized Anxiety Disorder. We will also continue developing our broader pipeline of safe and effective mental health therapeutics, delivering them to patients across the globe with an ultimate goal of using them in a maximally flexible context, such as at-home prescription use.”
Altman’s statement in support of the venture comes as the AI guru has said the current trajectory of artificial intelligence development means it could be close to curing cancer.
In a blog post last month, titled ‘Abundant Intelligence’, the tech billionaire predicted that AI could reach a level that would solve some of the world’s biggest problems.
The influential tech magnate has been courting the US government in earnest recently, even accompanying Donald Trump on his state visit to the UK at which the president and UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer agreed a billion-dollar “tech prosperity deal” as part of a larger major investment from U.S. companies.
The Independent has contacted Arcadia Medicine for comment.
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