‘Unparalleled’ study finds psilocybin protects against nerve damage from chemotherapy

The findings, which were made in mice, may offer a new way to prevent a common chemotherapy side effect that can last well beyond treatment

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron

Nitcharee Sukhontapirom/Getty Images (hands); Scientific American (background)

Chemotherapy is brutal. The cancer treatment is often lifesaving, but it comes with serious side effects. Some are shorter-lived, such as hair loss, nausea and fatigue, but others can last long after treatment is over and even for life. That’s the case with peripheral neuropathy. This painful side effect, which can cause tingling and numbness in the hands and feet, can be managed with ice and painkillers or opioids. But for the most part, it is unpreventable.

That could soon change: New research in mice suggests psilocybin, an active ingredient in magic mushrooms, may protect against this kind of severe nerve pain. The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, show that mice that were given two doses of psilocybin were protected against nerve damage caused by chemotherapy for as many as six cycles of treatment.

“This is the first time where psilocybin has been used as a neuroprotective agent,” said Patrick Dougherty, one of the paper’s co-authors and a professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, at a press conference ahead of the paper’s release.

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Past research has investigated psilocybin’s potential to treat this kind of nerve damage in mice, but the results are the first to show it can prevent such damage, too. “It’s a brand-new finding,” he said.

The research “pushes the needle” for psychedelics, which are already being studied for their use in treating conditions such as depression, addiction, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), said Moran Amit, a co-author of the paper and a professor and a neuroscientist at UT MD Anderson, at the same event.

“For the first time, we’re looking at pain—a somatic symptom—and we’re actually showing a really significant efficacy, not in treating that but in preventing that,” he said.

The discovery was something of an accident. One of Amit’s colleagues noticed that mice that had been given psilocybin avoided nerve damage after chemotherapy. But Amit didn’t believe it—not at first.

“Do it again,” he recalled telling her. “So she did, again and again and again.”

“We did it so many times with tumor, without tumor, different types of chemotherapy. And consistently, we did not see the development of neuropathy, whether we gave those animals just one cycle or even six consecutive cycles,” Amit said. “This is unparalleled.”

The reason why seems to have to do with how energy-producing structures called mitochondria move through nerve cells. Chemotherapy attacks “microtubules,” which are different structures in nerve cells that help transport mitochondria like a “railroad system,” Amit explained. With psilocybin, cells were able to maintain mitochondria’s movement along this “railroad.”

Source: Read the original article on www.scientificamerican.com