A traditional African psychedelic plant medicine has inspired two new drugs to treat addiction and depression. Ibogaine has been used for thousands of years during shamanistic rituals as a hallucinogen, to suppress hunger and tiredness, and even as an aphrodisiac.
But ibogaine, the main active ingredient of Tabernanthe iboga - a West African shrub that grows in the Congo and Angola, can be fatal. Now scientists have developed two new drug candidates for potentially treating addiction and depression, modelled on the pharmacology of ibogaine.
They say, at very low doses, the new compounds were able to "blunt" symptoms of both conditions in mice. The findings, published in the journal Cell, took inspiration from ibogaine’s impact on the serotonin transporter (SERT), which is also the target of antidepressants such as Prozac.
