Harvard's headache cure: LSD?
http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2010/11/05/harvards-headache-cure-lsd.html
by Galen Moore
November 5, 2010,
Move over, Advil. A Harvard Medical School researcher says LSD, the
hallucinogen at the heart of the 1960s drug counterculture, holds a
better treatment for humanity's worst headaches.
Harvard researcher John Halpern has formed a company he hopes will
bring to market a drug based on his research into the effects of
lysergic acid diethylamide on cluster headaches, a rare but
devastating condition that is as bad as it sounds.
Halpern, a noted expert in the long-term effects of drug use, said
research suggests chemicals present in LSD are an astonishingly
effective cure for cluster headaches. His company, Entheogen Corp.,
is seeking $10 million to bring the drug through to FDA approval,
according to a regulatory filing this week.
Entheogen's drug does not cause triptastic visions, Halpern said. It
is based on BOL-148, a non-hallucinogenic LSD derivative developed in
the 1950s and 60s for research into the effects of LSD on the brain,
when such was last in vogue. "Trying to do a double-blind,
placebo-controlled trial with a drug that's as psychoactive as LSD is
impossible," Halpern explained.
Then, grant funding for such research dried up. Halpern's Harvard
antecedent, Professor Timothy Leary, was expelled from the
university, and the culture at large adopted a zero-tolerance policy
to drug experimentation.
Fast forward half a century. Having studied the long-term effects of
ritual mescaline use by Native American tribes, Halpern was
approached earlier this decade by cluster headache sufferers who said
they had found LSD an effective medicine. "It was interesting to hear
people talk about the benefits of these drugs," he said. "You just
don't hear that from alcoholics or heroin addicts."
Halpern published an article on the cluster headache sufferers'
experience in 2006. Then, he and other scientists began a mostly
self-funded study into the impact of BOL-148 on cluster-headache
patients. He didn't expect it to work, he said, but it did.
He said the results show the drug could be an epigenetic medication,
meaning it took some patients from chronic symptoms to episodic with
one or two doses. One participant in the study, who had suffered 40
attacks a week for 30 years went to zero a week, Halpern said.
Cluster headaches are so named because they attack in cycles, coming
one after another in waves that can last weeks to months. Patients
usually experience long remissions between clusters.
Existing treatments are limited, Halpern said - but in spite of
exposure his work has gotten with articles in scientific journals and
a mention on the National Geographic Channel, he's gotten no interest
from big pharma. So, Halpern and Entheogen co-founders Torsten
Passie, a professor at Hannover Medical School in Germany, and Ari
Mello, a former investment banker with a background in Chinese
medicine, hope to bring the product to market themselves. The company
name comes from Greek roots meaning 'God within,' and refers to any
psychoactive substance used in a religious context.
The climate has changed since the late-1960s backlash, Halpern said.
Now, although the danger of abuse is widely recognized, drugs like
the painkiller OxyContin and the sedative thalidomide are prescribed.
The same could be true of Halpern's non-hallucinogenic LSD derivative, he said.
"The difficulty is not anything political or regulatory. It's just
dotting the i's and crossing the t's, just as you would for any
drug," Halpern said. "[There is] a little more scrutiny to be sure,
but the scrutiny is welcome," he said.
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