Chemotherapy is brutal. The cancer treatment is often lifesaving, but it comes with serious side effects. Some are shorter-lived, such as hair loss, nausea and fatigue, but others can last long after treatment is over and even for life. That’s the case with peripheral neuropathy. This painful side effect, which can cause tingling and numbness in the hands and feet, can be managed with ice and painkillers or opioids. But for the most part, it is unpreventable.
That could soon change: New research in mice suggests psilocybin, an active ingredient in magic mushrooms, may protect against this kind of severe nerve pain. The results, published on Thursday in the journal Science, show that mice that were given two doses of psilocybin were protected against nerve damage caused by chemotherapy for as many as six cycles of treatment.
“This is the first time where psilocybin has been used as a neuroprotective agent,” said Patrick Dougherty, one of the paper’s co-authors and a professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, at a press conference ahead of the paper’s release.
On supporting science journalism
If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
Past research has investigated psilocybin’s potential to treat this kind of nerve damage in mice, but the results are the first to show it can prevent such damage, too. “It’s a brand-new finding,” he said.
The research “pushes the needle” for psychedelics, which are already being studied for their use in treating conditions such as depression, addiction, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), said Moran Amit, a co-author of the paper and a professor and a neuroscientist at UT MD Anderson, at the same event.
“For the first time, we’re looking at pain—a somatic symptom—and we’re actually showing a really significant efficacy, not in treating that but in preventing that,” he said.
The discovery was something of an accident. One of Amit’s colleagues noticed that mice that had been given psilocybin avoided nerve damage after chemotherapy. But Amit didn’t believe it—not at first.
“Do it again,” he recalled telling her. “So she did, again and again and again.”
“We did it so many times with tumor, without tumor, different types of chemotherapy. And consistently, we did not see the development of neuropathy, whether we gave those animals just one cycle or even six consecutive cycles,” Amit said. “This is unparalleled.”
The reason why seems to have to do with how energy-producing structures called mitochondria move through nerve cells. Chemotherapy attacks “microtubules,” which are different structures in nerve cells that help transport mitochondria like a “railroad system,” Amit explained. With psilocybin, cells were able to maintain mitochondria’s movement along this “railroad.”
For now, the results are limited to mice and cellular models in the lab. But the researchers say they have good reason to believe the process will translate to humans. Anecdotally, the team has heard of chemotherapy patients who enrolled in psilocybin trials for other reasons and have said they’ve seen improvement in nerve-related symptoms, too.
Moran plans to put that hypothesis to the test in about a month in a clinical trial for patients with colorectal, breast, and head and neck cancers who are undergoing chemotherapy. With no other way for these patients to prevent nerve damage and pain, he said, “I think that it’s definitely worth a shot.”
Subscribe to Support Independent Journalism
Great science journalism requires human expertise, time, effort and creativity. And it costs money. That’s why I and the journalists here at Scientific American hope you’ll join our community.
When you subscribe, you are supporting staff and freelance journalists who are passionate about telling science stories that are true, important and compelling. Our editors and reporters are often experts in their fields, which means they understand the nuances of big discoveries and can untangle the breakthroughs from the hype. With a subscription, you are also supporting rigorous fact-checking to ensure the words we publish are precise and accurate. And you’re supporting original illustrations, graphics and photos that bring you closer to an advanced laboratory, an ice sheet in Antarctica or a space mission in orbit. You’re helping us craft other types of high-quality journalism as well: Our newsletters are carefully written, edited and curated by staffers you have or will come to know and love. Our Science Quickly podcast is based on original reporting, collaboration with editors and scientists and exacting production.
Subscriptions keep this engine running so we can continue to deliver thoughtful, rigorous and independent science journalism to you. In an era of viral misinformation, this work is crucial. If you value what we do, I hope you’ll consider joining us as a subscriber