David E. Olson

If tweaking the molecule was a great modification, could the original iboga molecule be simplified even further? Which brings us to the next massive leap in our timeline, Pabernantholog or TBG?

Yes, this takes us to the laboratory of David Olson at the University of California, Davis, and their landmark 2020 publication in the journal Nature.

the Olson lab took a completely different conceptual approach compared to Glick and Kuhn's work on 18MC.

How so? Well, while 18MC was about carefully tuning receptor affinities by making small structural adjustments, Olson's team utilized a strategy called function-oriented simplification.

Function-oriented simplification.

That sounds like a fancy way of saying they took a chainsaw to the molecule.

It has multiple interlocking rings of carbon and nitrogen atoms.

That rigidity makes it very difficult to synthesize from scratch in a laboratory setting.

And if we think differently about the causes of depression, then of course we'll be looking for different ways to treat it.

And that's why I wanted to chat with both of our guests in today's episode, Perry Hashmi, an associate professor in brain diagnostics and therapeutics at Imperial College London, and David Olson, director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at the University of California, Davis.

Both actually contribute to the peer-reviewed journal, ACS Chemical Neuroscience, Perry as an associate editor and David as editor-in-chief.

And they have varying theories on the causes of depression, but neither theory chalks it up to just a chemical imbalance.

Yeah, it could be really scary.

Yeah.

So this feels like a good time to introduce our next guest, David Olson, and his approach has been to explore the potential of a class of drugs that, until recently, were mostly used recreationally.

My full chemical name is Dextrolysergic acid diethylamide tartrate 25.

It's called TBG.

Um, you know, David Olson at UC Davis has been working on that.

You know, Deborah and I spoke a year or two ago, and she said, "You know, TBG, we invented that years ago." You know, that's not a new compound.

Uh, you know, but, you know, you know, but be that as it may, I think, you know, TBG is going into human trials.