Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin Inc., spoke to Psychedelic Health about how Kernel’s wearable technology – Flow – could act as a quantitative, real-time measurement device for the impact of psychedelic therapies.
Cybin’s study aimed to measure ketamine’s psychedelic effect on cerebral cortex hemodynamics by using the Flow device – a near-infrared spectroscopy system.
Kernel’s flow device enables the real-time quantification data collection of brain activity during the psychedelic experience, which has thus far been a major barrier within psychedelic research.
Typically, data collection of the psychedelic experience relies largely on subjective self-reporting. fMRI machines pose challenges as they are costly to run, and, being inside the machine under the influence of a psychedelic may be an uncomfortable experience for a subject.
According to Cybin, the study, which will soon be published in a peer-reviewed journal, provided important proof-of-principle for Kernel Flow as a portable functional system that can provide real-time measurements of blood oxygenation changes in the brain associated with neural activity.
Innovating diagnostics in psychedelics
Emphasising the lack of use of neuroimaging within mental health care, Doug Drysdale, CEO of Cybin, says that having the ability to understand more about what is happening in the brain with the use of psychedelics, and how those changes persist over time, could be very useful.
“We’re trying to understand the mechanisms of these molecules and their actions, so anything we can we can do to get more quantitative information rather than qualitative is helpful,” Drysdale commented.
“Maybe this data can help us understand where in the brain these molecules are targeting, where we’re seeing the most activity. If we think depression, for example, is a disease of brain connectivity, we don’t necessarily know where that those issues are occurring, or which parts of the brain are failing to connect or modulate each other.
“Perhaps by addressing depression with psychedelics and using imaging, we can see where the root cause is.”
As well as insights into the root cause, Drysdale suggests the data could provide insights into when the right time for patients to return for treatments of psychedelic therapies would be, as the study data demonstrated changes in brain connectivity that, over a course of days, fell back down to baseline.
“Maybe there’s a correlation between the changes that we saw and the duration of the benefit. You can imagine in the future, if you’ve got psychedelics that have benefits for months and months at a time, this could be a tool to indicate when it’s time for patients to come back for another treatment,” said Drysdale.
“So, instead of using qualitative measures like depression scales, perhaps a quasi-measure like this that can predict when someone is starting to slip back into their depression before they’re seeing symptoms themselves.
“This could be a useful diagnostic or measure tool for physicians or even patients at home.”
Drysdale concluded: “I think we are now in a period of time with psychedelics where we are getting into late-stage trials – we’ll see the first application to the FDA this year and we will see psychedelics approved in maybe the next 12 to 18 months or so.”
Cybin will now be interpreting the data from the study and evaluating the use of the Flow wearable technology for future use in clinical trials.
