Most psychedelic experiences don't happen in research labs. To better understand their effects, UC San Francisco scientists are going where the experiences are and launching a global study to track what psychedelics do to people's brains, bodies and well-being.
CANOPY will follow as many as 3,000 people around the world who plan to take psychedelics at home, organized retreats, and other settings, to see how the drugs affect their mood, well-being, and other psychological outcomes. Some of the study participants also will undergo brain imaging and provide physiological and biological data.
The project is one of three UCSF psychedelic research projects receiving awards totaling up to $8.5 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that invests in high-impact projects aimed at transforming health and medicine.
CANOPY, which received an award of up to $1.4 million, is led by Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, a UCSF professor of neurology. He is also co-leading a $4 million ARPA-H-funded study with Jennifer Mitchell, PhD, examining how mindset and environment influence psychedelic effects.
Mitchell also co-leads a third ARPA-H-funded project with Lorenzo Pasquini, PhD. That study received up to $3.1 million to examine psychedelics in older adults with low well-being and biomarkers associated with preclinical Alzheimer’s disease.
“Psychedelics are widely used outside research labs, yet much of what we know about their effects comes from carefully controlled research settings,” Carhart-Harris said. “CANOPY gives us an opportunity to bring scientific rigor to these experiences at a scale we haven’t had before — to understand not just whether psychedelics can be beneficial, but for whom, under what circumstances, and why.”
Unlike a traditional clinical trial, researchers will not provide participants with psychedelics or determine what they take. Instead, they will enroll people who are already planning to use psychedelics for a trial that will be done mostly remotely.
The study will encompass a broad range of psychedelics, including psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, and ibogaine, as well as MDMA, and ketamine. Participants will complete standardized assessments before and after psychedelic use and for up to six months afterward.
Those who can travel to UCSF will undergo brain imaging and EEG and provide blood and saliva samples before their planned psychedelic experiences; and they will use wearable devices to collect physiological data outside the lab.
Researchers hope CANOPY will help explain why psychedelic experiences can produce dramatically different outcomes from one person to another. They hope to disentangle the effects of the drug from individual, biological, psychological, and environmental factors that are associated with beneficial or adverse outcomes over time.
The project is also designed as a research platform for more targeted studies. Researchers hope the data will both inform future clinical trials and help scientists assess the risks and benefits of using psychedelics outside controlled research settings.
Researchers are recruiting adults who are already planning to use a psychedelic and are willing to complete research assessments. UCSF does not provide psychedelics or direct participants to obtain or use them. The main study is conducted remotely.
Eligibility and enrollment information is available on the CANOPY study website.
About UCSF: The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical system, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area. UCSF School of Medicine also has a regional campus in Fresno. Learn more at ucsf.edu.
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