Virginia Tech: Mescaline-Like Psychedelic Encourages Synaptic Plasticity Using Small Tissue Samples

Another respected university in the U.S., Virginia Tech, is making valuable discoveries in the field of psychedelics to help people struggling with emotional injuries.

Employing a lab process developed in 2015 by Chang Lu, professor of Chemical Engineering at Virginia Tech, is helping fellow researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University study the epigenomic effects of psychedelics on mice. Epigenetic science deals with how changes to an organism can alter the physical structure of DNA.

Using the compound 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI), a drug similar to mescaline and LSD, the collaborators discovered that Lu’s genomic analysis process allowed researchers to use a fraction of traditional tissue sample size from a specific region of a mouse brain (down to hundreds to thousands of cells compared to older processes) and draw meaningful conclusions.

The team believes their findings will provide an understanding of how psychedelic substances like psilocybin, mescaline and LSD may alleviate symptoms of addiction, anxiety, depression and PTSD.

Lu noted that human clinical trials with such substances, taking blood and urine samples and observing behaviors can only tell you so much. “Behavioral data will tell you the result,” he told Technology Network, “but it doesn’t tell you why it works in a certain way.”

Observing molecular changes in the brains of mice gives scientists a window into what Lu calls the ‘black box of neuroscience’ to understand the biological processes at work.

The joint study, published in Cell Reports, showed that after a single dose of DOI, the mice that had previously reacted to fear triggers no longer responded to them with fearful behaviors. In fact, the lack of anxiety continued long after DOI was no longer present in mice tissue samples, suggesting epigenetic changes.

Lu described personal reasons for why he is drawn to explore new treatments that expand into the field of psychedelics. "My older brother has had schizophrenia for the last 30 years,” said Lu. “So I've always been intrigued by mental health. And then once I found that our approach can be applied to look at processes like that — that's why I decided to do research in the field of brain neuroscience."

Virginia Tech’s psychedelic work using compounds like DOI is part of an expanding group of venerable research campuses putting resources and financial investment behind psychedelics, including Massachusetts General Hospital, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine.