Recent Press Coverage
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Situated in an Edwardian townhouse off Harley Street, the clinic is a bland place with revolutionary aims. Apart from its calming décor and opaque curtains there are few indications that it is a site where participants will experience mind-bending drug trips.
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Clerkenwell Health, founded last year with ambitions to help make the UK a world leader in psychedelics research, is outfitting a clinic near Harley Street, central London, that will be Europe’s first commercial setting for clinical trials. The first trial, scheduled to start at the end of this year, will involve treating 60 people with terminal cancer who all have adjustment disorder — which means they are struggling to come to terms with their diagnosis — with a combination of psilocybin and psychotherapy.
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Europe’s first commercial facility for psychedelic drug trials is to open in London, with the goal of making the UK a global leader in psychedelics research and innovation.
The British startup Clerkenwell Health aims to begin trials in its central London facility in August, initially focusing on the use of psilocybin to help people deal with the anxiety associated with a diagnosis of terminal illness, and to support them through their end-of-life care.
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Launched early last year, Clerkenwell Health still has a relatively small team (with just 15 employees) but has big ambitions. The company tells us it is currently working with three clients, including drug development company Octarine Bio, to design and deliver clinical trials for psilocybin and its analogues, but that it is looking to expand into other substances in the near future. Clerkenwell Health is also developing a patient-facing ehealth app and launching a therapist training programme, all in the hopes of making psychedelic treatments viable at scale. Eventually, it aims to be the go-to partner for all stages of psychedelic therapy and drug development.
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The centre, run by the pharmaceutical start-up Clerkenwell Health, will provide Europe’s first commercial setting for clinical trials of psychedelic drugs when it opens this summer.
It is a response to a body of evidence that psychedelics — long overlooked by the medical profession — have enormous potential to treat mental illness.
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Now, things finally seem to be ramping up again, and the UK’s fast becoming a world centre for research thanks to regulators that are increasingly willing to approve trials, and the recent introduction of a special pathway designed to bring innovative therapies to market more quickly. Clerkenwell Health’s new lab near Harley Street will work with drug companies around the world, including Toronto’s Psyence, Canada’s Mindset Pharma and US-based Mydecine, to tackle problems like end-of-life anxiety, psychiatric disorders and even nicotine addiction.
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Companies working in this space include Compass Pathways, MindMedicine, Alphagreen Group, Atai Life Sciences, Beckley Psytech, Braxia Scientific, Novamind, Clerkenwell Health, Pasithea Therapeutics and Field Trip Health, to name but a few.
Compass Pathways, Alphagreen Group, Beckley Psych and Clerkenwell Health all have a presence in the UK, while German based Atai Life Sciences is the largest shareholder in UK biotech Compass Pathways.
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One European psychedelics company is on its way to testing out another, more unusual method of production, one that effectively turns sugar into psilocybin. Octarine Bio, a synthetic biology company based in Copenhagen, will soon bring its biosynthetic psilocybin into human clinical trials through a new partnership with Clerkenwell Health, a London-based contract research organization that specializes in psychedelic medicines.
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Dr Sara Tai is a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Director of the Psychoactive Substances Research Unit at the University of Manchester (PSRUUM), and Lead Investigator of Clerkenwell Health’s Manchester-based trial. Dr Tai’s twenty years of clinical practice and academic research are key to advancing the therapy component of psychedelic-assisted therapies.
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The CEO of Clerkenwell Health, a British mental health start-up, explains how psychedelic-assisted therapy might hold the key to patient-centric treatment.
Psychedelic medicines are at a turning point. Used in combination with structured talking therapies, these compounds are being trialled in the treatment of mental health conditions. Last year, for instance, UK regulators gave the green light for the first clinical trial of the use of the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to treat depression.