Stanford Psychedelics: Carolyn Rodriguez

Business Trip by PsyMed Ventures, a podcast about the business of psychedelics

Welcome back to Business Trip by PsyMed Ventures, a podcast about the business of psychedelics! 🍄

Stanford University is one of the leading universities in psychedelic science, focusing on understanding how psychedelics work in the body. 

This is part 3 of a 3-part series, where we will explore groundbreaking discoveries via leading Stanford researchers who are revealing the significance of psychedelic science in modern research. We conclude the series with Carolyn Rodriguez.

Carolyn Rodriguez is Associate Dean at Stanford University School of Medicine and a psychiatrist at the Palo Alto VA. As Director of the Rodriguez Translational Therapeutics Lab, she leads studies on severe mental illness. Her clinical trials pioneer rapid-acting treatments for OCD and related disorders demonstrating ketamine's efficacy in reducing OCD symptoms. She now plans placebo-controlled studies of MDMA and other psychedelics, unlocking their therapeutic potential for OCD.

In this episode we discuss:

• Symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder

• Clinical trials to use ketamine to rapidly reduce OCD symptoms

• Hypothesis that ketamine modulates glutamate and disrupts OCD brain loops

• MDMA-assisted therapy for OCD to enhance exposure therapy

Listen to the episode here, on Spotify, or on Apple Podcasts.

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