Speaker 1: On this episode of News World, Stanford Medicine researchers have
Speaker 1: discovered that the plant based psychoactive drug ibogain, when combined
Speaker 1: with magnesium to protect the heart, safely and effectively, reduced
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression, and improved functioning
Speaker 1: in veterans with traumatic brain injury. Their study was published
Speaker 1: in the journal Nature Medicine on January fifth, twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: and was the first to include detailed data on thirty
Speaker 1: veterans of US Special Forces who had undergone supervised ibogain
Speaker 1: treatments one month after treatment. Participants experienced average reductions of
Speaker 1: eighty eight percent and PTSD symptoms, eighty seven percent in
Speaker 1: depression symptoms, and eighty one percent in anxiety symptoms. Formal
Speaker 1: cognitive testing also revealed improvements in participants concentration, information processing, memory,
Speaker 1: and impulsivity. Here to discuss the Stanford study on IVA Gain,
Speaker 1: I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, doctor Nolan Williams.
Speaker 1: He is an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Speaker 1: at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab. Doctor.
Speaker 1: Welcome and thank you for joining me in News world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to be here and really excited to
Speaker 2: talk about the work we're doing well.
Speaker 1: I just had W Bryan Hubbard on the podcast on Sunday,
Speaker 1: and our conversation really convinced me Iva Gain treatments have
Speaker 1: great potential, but I want to hear from someone who
Speaker 1: has studied the science. So I'm thrilled you would join
Speaker 1: me today as the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation
Speaker 1: Lab and an Associate Professor of psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.
Speaker 1: Can you tell us more about the focus of your
Speaker 1: work at Stanford? How did you get involved with doing
Speaker 1: the study in Eyba game.
Speaker 2: So I'm trained as both a psychiatrist and a neurologist.
Speaker 2: I did that in Charleston, South Carolina, and then came
Speaker 2: out to Stanford a little more than eleven years ago
Speaker 2: with the goal of developing treatments for problems where the
Speaker 2: current treatments aren't very good, they have a lot of
Speaker 2: side effects, or in conditions where there aren't currently available treatments, right,
Speaker 2: and so that's kind of our mandate. I have a
Speaker 2: big group that works on that, forty plus people in
Speaker 2: my lab, a bunch of junior faculty, and really what
Speaker 2: we're trying to do is to find solutions for hard
Speaker 2: to treat problems. And so we've developed into a stimulation
Speaker 2: approach for treatment resistant depression that can get people out
Speaker 2: of severe depression in a couple of days, gotten that
Speaker 2: through the FDA, gotten at to a point where now
Speaker 2: Medicare Innovation Funds pay for it. First psychiatric treatment ever
Speaker 2: to have that happen. And so we were working on
Speaker 2: that work since twenty fourteen, and then around twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: I was approached by Amber Marcus Capone. Marcus is a
Speaker 2: former seal who went down to Mexico and took this
Speaker 2: alkaloid from an African shrub. So it's the root bark
Speaker 2: extract of that shrub called the Iboga shrub in Gabon,
Speaker 2: which is in central West Africa. You know, I'd been
Speaker 2: around for some time and thought to be a potential
Speaker 2: anti addiction compound, but hadn't really been studied for much
Speaker 2: of anything else. And you know, the way he tells
Speaker 2: the story, he couldn't screw a light into a light
Speaker 2: fixture when he left to go to Mexico and looked
Speaker 2: like quite a normal guy when I met him after
Speaker 2: he'd come back and had been doing well for a
Speaker 2: while and told me his story, and his wife told
Speaker 2: me the story, and it was a very convincing story.
Speaker 2: And I've learned over the years to really listen to
Speaker 2: patients and listen to their stories and have that kind
Speaker 2: of guide the work that we do. And so we
Speaker 2: decided with some philanthropic funds that we were going to
Speaker 2: go and conduct a trial around this, which at the
Speaker 2: time was a little bit edgy, right. We had to
Speaker 2: go to the Stanford Institutional Review Board, which is the
Speaker 2: research panel that evaluates research protocols, and make a compelling
Speaker 2: case that we were going to knowingly study something where
Speaker 2: the veterans were knowingly going to go down and take
Speaker 2: a compound that's currently illegal in the US but not
Speaker 2: illegal in Mexico, Canada, Australia, New Zealand other European countries
Speaker 2: and basically evaluate them before after, and then a month after,
Speaker 2: and then we kept evaluating them out to a year
Speaker 2: of that data coming out shortly and what we found
Speaker 2: was quite remarkable. People had a transformative improvement. Their post
Speaker 2: traumatic stresses sort of depression, anxiety, all got better. But
Speaker 2: what was really striking is there from traumatic brain injury
Speaker 2: it took a little while longer. It took out to
Speaker 2: the months to get them to a point where you
Speaker 2: saw a reversal of a lot of that disability. But
Speaker 2: you know, going back to what I said originally finding
Speaker 2: treatments where there's no treatment available. There's no drug available
Speaker 2: for traumatic brain injury. People call that a permanent neurological injury,
Speaker 2: and permanent meaning that there hasn't been anything to date
Speaker 2: that's able to reverse it. And what we found was
Speaker 2: a really striking reversal and basically nearly everyone at the
Speaker 2: one month mark and their levels of disability. And so
Speaker 2: what's so fascinating about this drug is that it seems
Speaker 2: to be capable of potentially having neural repair effects. And
Speaker 2: that's unique. That's not something that we've seen much of before,
Speaker 2: and why I think people are so excited about the possibilities.
Speaker 1: Do you have any sense of the science of why
Speaker 1: it's having this repair effect?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. I'm going to give some background.
Speaker 2: Now you may know that some of your listeners may
Speaker 2: know it, but just to kind of get levels, setting
Speaker 2: everybody on the same page. And so if a six
Speaker 2: month old baby has a neurological injury or has brain
Speaker 2: surgery for intractable epilepsy, and they lose one half of
Speaker 2: their brain, one hemisphere of their brain, they can actually
Speaker 2: adapt and the other hemisphere can take over a lot
Speaker 2: or all of the functions, right, And we call that
Speaker 2: the critical period. And so there's a critical period where
Speaker 2: the brain can really redesignate function, and that critical period
Speaker 2: closes in everyone. Right in adulthood, we don't have that.
Speaker 2: So if you speaker, or I had a big stroke
Speaker 2: right now and it hit one hemisphere or our brain,
Speaker 2: we would lose a lot of functions. It'd be very
Speaker 2: hard to reassign function, right, But in that baby example,
Speaker 2: you could. And so one of the big curiosities of
Speaker 2: human neuroscience has been is there a way to develop
Speaker 2: a drug that could re establish that critical period, right,
Speaker 2: even transiently, they would allow for you to reassign brain
Speaker 2: function in the case of brain damage. And so there's
Speaker 2: work out of Hopkins and Berkeley suggesting and a lot
Speaker 2: of work to confirm this that in fact, these compounds
Speaker 2: actually will produce a transient critical period window where functions
Speaker 2: could be reassigned where the brain is highly plastic, and
Speaker 2: that is one of the ideas of what's going on.
Speaker 2: Another idea that's likely related, but just a different way
Speaker 2: of thinking about it, is this is a highly neurotrophic drug,
Speaker 2: so it produces really high kind of plasticity states.
Speaker 1: Let me slay it down for second. What is neurotropic.
Speaker 2: So basically there's kind of growth promoting factors in the
Speaker 2: brain that are really present early on and then they
Speaker 2: kind of wane over time, and so glial derived neurotrophic
Speaker 2: factor gets upregulated by I begain and that's pretty specific
Speaker 2: to I begin. All the other psychedelic compounds seem to
Speaker 2: have an effect on brain derived neurotrophic factor at a
Speaker 2: scale that orders the magnitude more than conventional oral antidepressants.
Speaker 2: And these are really plasticity kind of agents, right, They
Speaker 2: make the brain again more malleable, and that's really what
Speaker 2: you want. You know, if the brain's very fixed in
Speaker 2: its function, it can't reassign function. It's very hard. I
Speaker 2: don't know if you remember back in the nineties you
Speaker 2: had to defrag your computer. You remember that absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 2: what you were kind of doing is reassigning function of
Speaker 2: those memory units, right, So this is something like that, Right.
Speaker 2: It allows for you to reassign function in a different way.
Speaker 2: That's really what we think is going on at the
Speaker 2: brain level, and then there's this whole kind of psychological
Speaker 2: function level that also happens. And so what the veterans
Speaker 2: will tell you is it's not like other psychedelic compounds
Speaker 2: or other psychoactive compounds, where you may have external things
Speaker 2: that you're seeing or whatever. What people typically talk about,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the veterans will say this is
Speaker 2: that the drug produced as a state where they actually
Speaker 2: observe earlier life emotionally salient memories in the case of say,
Speaker 2: wartime trauma, earlier memories of wartime events that they've had
Speaker 2: a hard time letting go, and it allows them to
Speaker 2: finally kind of let it go. And I think that's
Speaker 2: an important kind of psych coological function for folks to
Speaker 2: understand that really these things kind of get stuck in
Speaker 2: people's memory systems and kind of really, you know, in
Speaker 2: many ways, mess up their ability to have normal function.
Speaker 2: Because if you were shot at so many times, then
Speaker 2: you know, you're walking down the street and somebody's car
Speaker 2: makes the noise or something, you're behind the mailbox thinking
Speaker 2: that there's some enemy or something as You're kind of
Speaker 2: transported back to that war experience, right, And that's what
Speaker 2: people with wartime PTSD are living with all the time, right.
Speaker 2: And so what this drug does psychologically is it allows
Speaker 2: the person to go back and look at those events
Speaker 2: and kind of let them go and have the brain
Speaker 2: kind of not see them as so important to bring
Speaker 2: back up. And that's important because when they walk out
Speaker 2: of this experience, their life isn't controlled by those events anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's really why we think the PTSD, the post
Speaker 2: traumatic stress disorder see to get better.
Speaker 1: The percentages that you were showing after a one month
Speaker 1: of treatment are pretty staggering.
Speaker 2: They're really staggering. Yeah. I tell people that my postdoc
Speaker 2: showed me those percentages and I didn't believe them at
Speaker 2: first and told him that he must have made a
Speaker 2: calculation error, you know. And so, you know, one of
Speaker 2: those times where it was great to be wrong, you know,
Speaker 2: he came back a month later and it was all right,
Speaker 2: and I was wrong and the numbers were right.
Speaker 1: So I know that you had very very good results
Speaker 1: in the first month, but did you do a follow
Speaker 1: up and what was the effect a year later?
Speaker 2: So we continue to follow folks out to a year.
Speaker 2: We wanted to publish the one month data to get
Speaker 2: it out there. There's always an urgency, and so we
Speaker 2: were still following folks out to the year at that point,
Speaker 2: and so we followed people at the year where that
Speaker 2: data's in review now, and almost all the folks that
Speaker 2: were looking good at one month but one month held
Speaker 2: it out to a year off of a single dose.
Speaker 2: And I think that's really important because if you've got
Speaker 2: a drug where there's some cardiac rist and people have
Speaker 2: to be monitored and it works, you get to go
Speaker 2: in once a month to do it, that would be complicated, right,
Speaker 2: But if you've got to go in once a year,
Speaker 2: once every couple of years, maybe never again, depending upon
Speaker 2: the problem, then that all of a sudden becomes really
Speaker 2: quite compelling. And that's what we observe that most people
Speaker 2: did end up holding it out to a year, and
Speaker 2: there are very few compounds that anybody's observed that can
Speaker 2: do that.
Speaker 1: And I yeah that it may also have an addition
Speaker 1: to traumatic brain injury. There may be other aspects, for
Speaker 1: example of being a drug addict, where hypo gain may
Speaker 1: actually dramatically shorten the healing time to enable people to
Speaker 1: move beyond their addiction. I mean, have you looked at
Speaker 1: any of that or is that a different zone.
Speaker 2: No, we've looked at that. So we've looked at trying
Speaker 2: to treat alcohol use disorders or alcoholism, and we've seen
Speaker 2: great effects with alcohol use disorder in people. They were
Speaker 2: pretty heavy drinkers, and that data's going to come out soon.
Speaker 2: A lot of them stop drinking, a lot of them
Speaker 2: really significantly reduced their drinking. And what people will say,
Speaker 2: which is also kind of interesting psychologically, is after this happens,
Speaker 2: after they go through all this and it's a couple
Speaker 2: weeks out, it re establishes the ability to have kind
Speaker 2: of unbiased choice, right, Like, I don't know, are you
Speaker 2: a coffee drinker or you gum to or anything speaker.
Speaker 2: A lot of us to drink coffee, you know, maybe
Speaker 2: we feel highly compelled every morning to drink the coffee.
Speaker 2: And it's still a choice, but you're biased towards drinking it, right,
Speaker 2: Your brain is kind of more biased to do it
Speaker 2: than not do it. That's true for me, maybe true
Speaker 2: for you. Most people are coffee drinkers have that experience.
Speaker 2: What happens with these guys in the case of whether
Speaker 2: it's alcohol or drug, uses are highly biased towards using it.
Speaker 2: You know, in some cases they cannot use it, but
Speaker 2: the probability that they're not going to use it's truly
Speaker 2: low because their brain's so biased to use it. And
Speaker 2: so what they'll say is that when they get out
Speaker 2: of this, it feels like a completely neutral choice. They
Speaker 2: get presented with alcohol and they say, you know what,
Speaker 2: I'd rather just go take a job, or I'd rather
Speaker 2: go spend some time with my kids, or I'd rather
Speaker 2: go and drink a diet coke or whatever, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's what's so interesting about this is it allows
Speaker 2: people to have that choice, and when you give people
Speaker 2: that choice, they tend to take the choice that's actually
Speaker 2: a much more healthy one. And so what's really interesting
Speaker 2: is most of the guys that did this, in addition
Speaker 2: to stopping drinking alcohol, that actually we found they stopped
Speaker 2: drinking caffeine drinks, They stop doing a lot of things,
Speaker 2: and they just kind of did the sorts of things
Speaker 2: that they kind of wanted to do, and so it
Speaker 2: really unbiases people's decision making.
Speaker 1: When you were doing your study, you were very aware
Speaker 1: of the potential danger of cardiac problems. And as I
Speaker 1: understand it, the ibogain was administered in combination with magnesium.
Speaker 1: Now why magnesium and why does that reduce the cardiac risk?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. So if you go into
Speaker 2: the American Heart Association guidelines for something called torsades, which
Speaker 2: is this fatal arrhythmia that can be the result of
Speaker 2: a lot of things. Drugs that are approved by the FDA,
Speaker 2: like a drug called tikasin, and there's also chemo agents
Speaker 2: that can interact to this herd potassium channel, and I
Speaker 2: begain interacts with this herd potassium channel, so they all
Speaker 2: do it. Tikosan, for instance, is monitored in a cardiac
Speaker 2: monitoring unit because of this. And so you go in
Speaker 2: the American Heart Association guidelines for treating torsodes, what you
Speaker 2: see is that the American Heart Association recommends to give
Speaker 2: magnesium in the case of torsades once you already have it.
Speaker 2: And magnesium is not completely without risk, but it's pretty
Speaker 2: low risk. Like as a neurologist, I gave magnesium to
Speaker 2: people of various headache conditions in the er, women that
Speaker 2: are preeclamptic at magnesium and that kind of period peri childbirth,
Speaker 2: and so giving magnesium at these levels, you know, has
Speaker 2: some minor minor risk, but really is pretty safe. We
Speaker 2: know a lot about it, and so there was this
Speaker 2: view that we took on around that if you can
Speaker 2: treat the problem with magnesium, then you probably can prophylacts
Speaker 2: against it ever happening with giving magnesium before the person
Speaker 2: got the drug, and we thought that was a kind
Speaker 2: of a unique kind of strategy, right where we're going
Speaker 2: to give magnesium before you get the drug and then
Speaker 2: we think significantly lower your risk of that arrhythmia. And
Speaker 2: we didn't see any torsades in any of our samples,
Speaker 2: and we think we have some early data to suggest
Speaker 2: that that may be the ticket for dealing with that
Speaker 2: particular risk. Now it's an interesting problem, right because, as
Speaker 2: I said a minute ago, the FDA has already approved
Speaker 2: drugs that actually have more risk for this arrhythmia than
Speaker 2: I begame does, but ibans had a harder time getting
Speaker 2: through the FDA. And the reason I think that that
Speaker 2: has historically happened, although this FDA seems to have a
Speaker 2: different kind of positive stance on it, is the risk
Speaker 2: benefit assessment of a cardiac drug that also has a
Speaker 2: cardiac risk ends up being different than an addiction drug
Speaker 2: that has a cardiac risk. And I think that the
Speaker 2: veteran's story is an important one for really pushing the
Speaker 2: FDA and the government in the field and to seeing, okay,
Speaker 2: veterans are killing themselves every year than are dying on
Speaker 2: the battlefield.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that one of the and I'm
Speaker 1: hoping this is going to change, but that historically one
Speaker 1: of the FDA problems has been that they measure the
Speaker 1: cost of saying yes, but they don't measure the cost
Speaker 1: of saying no. You know, there are people out here
Speaker 1: committing suicide, and this has a reasonable chance of minimizing that.
Speaker 1: You have to figure out what are the total lives
Speaker 1: saved annually versus what's the risk And I don't think
Speaker 1: the FDA has any kind of measurement. It's all based
Speaker 1: on risk only on the usage side, not based on
Speaker 1: the cost of not doing it.
Speaker 2: One hundred percent, You're completely spot on the the risk
Speaker 2: is only evaluated in the yes position, not in the
Speaker 2: no position. And maybe that's a regulatory change that could
Speaker 2: be seen where there was an additional evaluation point on
Speaker 2: saying no. From the standpoint of the FDA, but absolutely,
Speaker 2: and that's what hurdles you have to kind of get over.
Speaker 2: And to your point, whether it be veterans suicide or
Speaker 2: opioid overdoses, this is a drug that can actually decrease
Speaker 2: the symptoms of detox for opiates right and reduce people's
Speaker 2: discomforting going through opia detoks in addition of reducing craving,
Speaker 2: the opioid crisis, the veterans suicide crisis. We think this
Speaker 2: has great potential for doing that. And the hope is
Speaker 2: is that there is a bias and it appears to
Speaker 2: be going away around taking on some of this risk
Speaker 2: and more of an openness in this FDA around evaluating
Speaker 2: in that more holistic way. And so you know, our
Speaker 2: fingers are crossed. You know, we have an I ind
Speaker 2: and trying to see if the FDA will let us
Speaker 2: do our first phase one trial now, and we're optimistic
Speaker 2: we can get over that hurdle.
Speaker 1: What percent of the folks who got that dosage never
Speaker 1: had any more interest in suicide and what percent found
Speaker 1: that they were still depression and in a mode to
Speaker 1: potentially commit suicide?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, you know, greater than eighty plus percent
Speaker 2: of people lost their kind of suicidal thinking and they
Speaker 2: held that out through the end of the year. We
Speaker 2: had no one in our follow up that actually had
Speaker 2: a suicide attempt or died of suicide. In the few
Speaker 2: folks that didn't hold it or had a transient improvement,
Speaker 2: we're hoping there are other either dozing strategies or other
Speaker 2: technologies that can take care of those folks. But just
Speaker 2: as a contrast the current treatments that are out there
Speaker 2: for PTSD and depression and whatnot, you're talking about at
Speaker 2: best twenty percent sort of numbers. It goes down over
Speaker 2: time to really take care of these problems, and then
Speaker 2: it's not very fast. In contrast, this is kind of
Speaker 2: a striking number, But you know, we have more work
Speaker 2: to do to really fully answer that question in hundreds
Speaker 2: of people and have conclusive kind of final FDA level data.
Speaker 2: But the signal that we have now is that it
Speaker 2: really holds for a while and reduces that risk for
Speaker 2: a long time.
Speaker 1: So there could be a spectrum effect where some people
Speaker 1: once is enough for their lifetime and other people need
Speaker 1: to come back in three months or six months.
Speaker 2: That's kind of what we're seeing, is that a lot
Speaker 2: of veterans will tell me they'll go back once a
Speaker 2: year kind of thing for a couple of years, and
Speaker 2: then they don't need to do it anymore. There may
Speaker 2: be a few folks, to your point, that need to
Speaker 2: come back more frequently, but the bulk of folks tend
Speaker 2: to hold it to a year, which is great.
Speaker 1: Your participants actually went to a clinic in Baja California
Speaker 1: run by Ambio Life Sciences. What is Ambio Life Sciences.
Speaker 2: There's a number of I Begain clinics that exist outside
Speaker 2: of the US, so Ambo is one of them. There
Speaker 2: are others that's specialized in administering I begain. Because I
Speaker 2: Began doesn't hold an illegal status in Mexico, you know,
Speaker 2: it can be administered as a medical treatment in Mexico. Historically,
Speaker 2: that's been true for Canada, it's true for Australia and
Speaker 2: New Zealand and I think half of the European countries. Right,
Speaker 2: the definition of a controlled substance requires that there's an
Speaker 2: abuse liability risk, and that's an important part of understanding
Speaker 2: I Began is that there's not a single case report
Speaker 2: in the literature of anybody with an I Began adviction,
Speaker 2: right and that's really important to understand is that this
Speaker 2: drug itself. You don't start taking this and stop taking
Speaker 2: another drug. But when you start taking this, now, all
Speaker 2: of a sudden, you have a new addiction. Right, That's
Speaker 2: not what this does. Like you take this. Once people
Speaker 2: get off of the compound, they don't really tend to
Speaker 2: take I began again. It's not that pleasurable to do so.
Speaker 2: And so because of that, you've got scenarios where people
Speaker 2: will come into clinics in Mexico or wherever it is,
Speaker 2: do a single administration I began, get off of opiates
Speaker 2: or better from their PTSD or whatever it is, and
Speaker 2: go back home. And our data that we haven't published
Speaker 2: yet we've published SIN shows that they get a year
Speaker 2: of benefit from a single dose. And so people typically
Speaker 2: for Ambia will fly into San Diego, take a van
Speaker 2: to Tijuana, go to a nice kind of treatment facility
Speaker 2: there and get treated and go back to San Diego.
Speaker 2: So Brett Favre, the NFL player, as I understand it,
Speaker 2: just did this and has come out and said publicly
Speaker 2: that he's had this experience. And so there's a number
Speaker 2: of people that have gone down and done this sort
Speaker 2: of trip. The real tragedy. I think of all of
Speaker 2: this is just that we have these veterans. So we're
Speaker 2: trying to rectify that by having at least studies and
Speaker 2: hopefully eventually treatment if everything works out and the studies
Speaker 2: are positive. In the US, do you have.
Speaker 1: Any sense from Congress of a willingness to put pressure
Speaker 1: on the FDA about this.
Speaker 2: I've met with a number of people, some of whom
Speaker 2: are currently sitting Congressmen, many of whom are Republican House
Speaker 2: representative members in Texas for instance, who are very supportive
Speaker 2: of this, as well as former folks, and I think
Speaker 2: there's definitely support. What I've heard, and you know better
Speaker 2: than anybody around this question is like modifying the Controlled
Speaker 2: Substances Act. It's going to be very hard to do.
Speaker 2: And part of what has to happen, because it's a
Speaker 2: DEA issue, is around how do you get to somebody
Speaker 2: like Pambondi and have the conversation around downscheduling these compounds right,
Speaker 2: Because there's an approval process that has to happen, there's
Speaker 2: also a downscheduling process that has to happen because as
Speaker 2: it stands right now, I began as a schedule one
Speaker 2: substance like all the other psychedelics, and as you know,
Speaker 2: the definition of that is abuse liability, which isn't true
Speaker 2: no medicinal u use. And so in order for it
Speaker 2: to become a treatment, it has to be down scheduled
Speaker 2: off of one, so that we're now saying this does
Speaker 2: have medicinal use. As you know, even cocaine is an
Speaker 2: unscheduled one. Cocaine's considered schedule two because the dentists will
Speaker 2: use it the nts, and so I began sits like
Speaker 2: a more restricted status than cocaine.
Speaker 1: I think your study is going to be a major
Speaker 1: step towards people like Secretary Kennedy putting real pressure to
Speaker 1: make it available in this country. Let me ask you
Speaker 1: one of the questions about the risk side. When you
Speaker 1: think about the number of people who might be helped
Speaker 1: by hypergain, how serious, in your judgment, is the cardiac challenge,
Speaker 1: and to what degree does the magnesium eliminate or minimize
Speaker 1: that risk.
Speaker 2: I'm not aware of anybody that's had full blown torsades
Speaker 2: when they got prophylactic magnesium. I'm always asking, but that
Speaker 2: seems to be something that really risk mitigates. When I
Speaker 2: went to the head of cardiac electric physiology at Stanford
Speaker 2: and others, and people that ran that in the University
Speaker 2: of Colorado and others. What they told me is they said, hey, look,
Speaker 2: we have this drug, Tikisan, we use it all the time.
Speaker 2: It's got more risks than I begain. We give it
Speaker 2: in a cardiac monitoring unit. A lot of these deaths
Speaker 2: that happened in these arrhythm as, it happened early twenty
Speaker 2: years ago and whatnot. It all happened when people were
Speaker 2: getting this administered to them in hotel rooms, you know,
Speaker 2: in various places because people are really addicted. There wasn't
Speaker 2: another way to do this. You couldn't get it in
Speaker 2: the US. This is the only way to kind of
Speaker 2: get off of heroin or whatever it was. So they
Speaker 2: were willing to take that risk. But the reality is
Speaker 2: is that we're not going to be doing that in
Speaker 2: the US, right We're going to be giving this in
Speaker 2: a cardiac monitoring unit, and we're going to have a
Speaker 2: lot of tools on our tool belt, just like cardiologists
Speaker 2: do for tikasan to be able to deal with it.
Speaker 2: And because of that, it's really not any more of
Speaker 2: a risk than the FDA approved drugs for cardiac rhythmias,
Speaker 2: and the cardiologists would be heavily involved in these administrations.
Speaker 2: When you talk to them about it, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, there's a risk, but you know, we would
Speaker 2: just put people in our unit and we would monitor
Speaker 2: and manage the risk. And we needed to do something,
Speaker 2: we would do something about it, you know. And so
Speaker 2: I think it's about medicalizing this and within a legitimate
Speaker 2: medical setting and really thinking about this as a medical
Speaker 2: intervention within the US healthcare system. And if you think
Speaker 2: in those terms, and we get to that point, and
Speaker 2: I think it's a consideration when you're talking to a patient,
Speaker 2: and it's always a consideration as the doctor, but it's
Speaker 2: the like healthcare policy level. It shouldn't be something that
Speaker 2: gets in the way. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1: If EYB again turns out to have the variety of
Speaker 1: capabilities that we have some at least glimmerings of its
Speaker 1: effect both on the quality of life, the relative health
Speaker 1: of patients, and the fiscal impact is going to be staggering.
Speaker 1: This could be one of the great breakthroughs of the
Speaker 1: next ten or fifteen years.
Speaker 2: That's what we feel. I mean, I don't think, you know,
Speaker 2: I've said this publicly before. I'm not aware of a
Speaker 2: brain acting compound that is this sophisticated or this broad spectrum.
Speaker 2: And you know, you think about antibiotics and you have
Speaker 2: these broad spectrum antibiotics that can take care of all
Speaker 2: sorts of different bacteria or whatever. I mean, this is
Speaker 2: a really broad spectrum. The data that we have right
Speaker 2: now suggests it's a really broad brain drug, kind of
Speaker 2: brain plasticity drug.
Speaker 1: Let me go back for a second because it hit me.
Speaker 1: Governor Habit of Texas signed a law just in June
Speaker 1: of this year, June eleventh of twenty twenty five to
Speaker 1: establish serious clinical trials to what excent are they going
Speaker 1: to be hampered by? The degree to which I begin
Speaker 1: is currently a Schedule one status.
Speaker 2: You can do Schedule one studies in the US right now.
Speaker 2: There have been a number of them with other psychedelics
Speaker 2: like psilocybin and whatnot, and so there's a lot of hurles.
Speaker 2: You have to have a safe and weigh it every
Speaker 2: day and all that stuff. But people can do that.
Speaker 2: That's fine. You can still get there. And that's our
Speaker 2: current investigation in new drug application sitting in the FDA
Speaker 2: right now, takes all that into account. But to your point,
Speaker 2: to really study this and to get researchers more enthused
Speaker 2: to do it, if it could be down scheduled down
Speaker 2: to two or three, then you don't need to safe
Speaker 2: pharmacies can administer it and it would make research a
Speaker 2: whole heck of a lot easier. Now, if that didn't happen,
Speaker 2: would you still be able to do the research? Absolutely,
Speaker 2: that fifty million is going to go towards good work
Speaker 2: and all that good stuff. What you have to do
Speaker 2: to do a schedule one study is you have to
Speaker 2: install a safe and a key card reader, all this stuff.
Speaker 2: You have to have a DEA agent come out and
Speaker 2: look at your safe. It's quite a journey, but you know,
Speaker 2: we're on board for that.
Speaker 1: I think we need a much higher sense of urgency
Speaker 1: about certain kinds of breakthroughs. And I'm thinking, like from
Speaker 1: the Veterans Administration, the scale of what they deal with
Speaker 1: in areas that are potentially directly affected and improved by
Speaker 1: IBA game, it really should be a national project to
Speaker 1: make sure how to use it, to make sure that
Speaker 1: it's safe, but then to get it very widely available
Speaker 1: throughout the entire Veterans administration program.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely. We've been trying to have those initial conversations
Speaker 2: and really try to find inroads into talking with folks
Speaker 2: in the current VA. I've had some discussions with former
Speaker 2: administration kind of officials from the VA with enthusiasm, you know.
Speaker 2: I think that there's a certain hot potato that happens
Speaker 2: with some of this stuff where somebody has to hold it,
Speaker 2: you know, and so we're happy to kind of hold
Speaker 2: it and get enough of the ball rolling so that
Speaker 2: there's some momentum. And then my senses is that once
Speaker 2: there's enough of a snowball effect, to your point, then
Speaker 2: the VA is going to really pick this up and
Speaker 2: run with it. That's really my hope. I met with
Speaker 2: folks early on at the VA and showed them the
Speaker 2: data a couple of years ago, some of the senior
Speaker 2: doctors there, and they all seem very enthused. And so
Speaker 2: it's just in my view of matter of time but
Speaker 2: continuing to do the good work.
Speaker 1: Where are the major veterans organizations on ibogame.
Speaker 2: They're very positive, you know, and I've talked to some
Speaker 2: folks from DD two and so they're very positive. But
Speaker 2: I think everybody is in the kind of wait and see.
Speaker 2: And that's why I think what Governor Perry's you know,
Speaker 2: work in Texas and now in other states, why that's
Speaker 2: so important, Because I think that getting some momentum going
Speaker 2: and then being able to go back once we have
Speaker 2: a big completed trial where we can go and say,
Speaker 2: look like, we do this in two hundred veterans, and
Speaker 2: it separates really nicely from hopefully I'm speculating right now,
Speaker 2: but if everything goes well, it separates really nice from
Speaker 2: the placebo pill and it looks like it's very real.
Speaker 2: We want to get this through the FDA, and we
Speaker 2: want the VA to take it up and run with
Speaker 2: it as soon as we do.
Speaker 1: What you're doing is really really important for literally millions
Speaker 1: of people.
Speaker 2: Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1: I'm very impressed. Frankly, this was exactly the conversation I
Speaker 1: was hoping we were going to have after our introductory
Speaker 1: conversation about IBA game. I want to thank you for
Speaker 1: joining me and giving us your medical assessment on ibgame treatments.
Speaker 1: And I want to let our listeners know they can
Speaker 1: find the study you conducted, which was published in Nature
Speaker 1: Medicine at Nature dot com, and they can also read
Speaker 1: more about it by visiting med dot Stanford dot edu.
Speaker 1: And you're really doing very important work, doctor Williams. And
Speaker 1: I'm very grateful that you would take this time to
Speaker 1: share with us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you so much, speaker, and happy to chat anytime,
Speaker 2: and thank you for your interests. So have a great tek.
Speaker 1: Thank you to my guest, doctor Nolan Williams. You can
Speaker 1: learn more about the Stanford Study and ibigain on our
Speaker 1: show page at newtsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by
Speaker 1: Gagish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan.
Speaker 1: Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show
Speaker 1: was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
Speaker 1: at Gingerish three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I
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Speaker 1: can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of
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Speaker 1: is Nutsworld.