Research journey
DMT: 25 trials, 153 papers, one canvas
Twenty-five registered trials against one hundred and fifty-three papers. Synthesised in 1931, shown to be active in humans in 1956, prohibited in 1971, and clinically untouched until 2020. The compound whose selling point is how quickly it ends.
Milestones are curated from the Blossom research database. Registry completion dates are shown as planned; probability-weighted forecasts are part of Blossom Enterprise.
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Origins
1931 to 1970Synthesised, found in plants, and shown to be active in people.1931
DMT is made before anyone knows what it does
Richard Manske synthesises N,N-dimethyltryptamine in a Canadian laboratory as one compound among many. Nobody takes it, and nobody notices.
DMT is unusual among the classical psychedelics in that chemistry got there first. Manske made it while working through a series of tryptamine derivatives, published the synthesis, and moved on. Twenty-five years passed before anyone established that the molecule did anything to a human being at all.
That gap matters for how you read the rest of this canvas. Mescaline and psilocybin were pulled out of plants that people were already using, so the pharmacology arrived after the effect was known. With DMT the order was reversed, and the compound sat inert in the literature for a quarter of a century.
It was, of course, being used the whole time. DMT is the active tryptamine in Amazonian ayahuasca and in the Anadenanthera snuffs of the southern Amazon and the Caribbean, preparations far older than the record of them. What Manske made was the isolated molecule, which behaves very differently from either: without a monoamine oxidase inhibitor to protect it, oral DMT does nothing.
1946
The molecule is found in plants
DMT is isolated from Mimosa root bark in Brazil, and in the mid-1950s identified in the Anadenanthera snuffs of South America. The laboratory compound turns out to be a natural product.
Gonçalves de Lima isolated a crystalline base from Mimosa tenuiflora root bark in 1946 and named it nigerine. It was later shown to be the same substance Manske had synthesised. Within a decade DMT had also been identified in the seeds used to prepare Anadenanthera snuffs, closing the loop between the chemistry and the ethnobotany.
This is the point at which DMT stops being a curiosity and becomes interesting to psychiatry, because it is now a compound with a demonstrated history of human use, a plausible mechanism and no known therapeutic application. That combination attracted researchers for the next fifteen years, mostly for the wrong reason.
1956
Szára establishes human activity
Unable to obtain LSD, Stephen Szára synthesises DMT in Budapest and injects himself. The effects arrive within a minute and are gone inside an hour.
Szára wanted LSD for research into psychosis and could not get it, because Sandoz would not supply a laboratory behind the Iron Curtain. So he made DMT instead, took an intramuscular dose himself, and found something that nobody had reported before: a psychedelic that comes on almost immediately and finishes almost as quickly.
The self-experiment established two facts that shape everything downstream. First, DMT is inactive by mouth but powerfully active when injected or inhaled, which is why the isolated molecule and the traditional oral preparations are not interchangeable. Second, and this is the fact the whole modern commercial case rests on, the experience is short. Not shorter in the way that a four-hour drug is shorter than an eight-hour drug. Short enough to fit inside a routine appointment.
Szára was doing this to model schizophrenia, not to treat anything. The therapeutic reading of DMT is a twenty-first century idea grafted onto a mid-century psychotomimetic research programme, and the two are easy to confuse when reading the older literature.
1965
DMT is reported in human blood and urine
Analytical work detects DMT in human body fluids, and an enzyme capable of making it is described. The compound becomes a candidate cause of psychosis.
If the body makes its own psychedelic, perhaps psychosis is a manufacturing fault. That hypothesis, usually called the transmethylation hypothesis, drove a substantial share of DMT research through the 1960s and 1970s and was the reason public money was available for it at all.
The evidence has never settled. A critical review covering 1955 to 2010 found that most positive detections came from assays that could not reliably distinguish DMT from related compounds, and that concentrations, where measured properly, were very low. Later work has confirmed the presence of DMT and of the enzyme INMT in mammalian tissue without establishing that either does anything at physiological levels.
It is a live argument sixty years on, and worth flagging because the popular version of it, that DMT floods the brain at death, is not something the papers in this database support. The near-death comparison rests on the resemblance between the two experiences, not on any measured surge.
Prohibition, with one exception
1971 to 2019Schedule I. Strassman's New Mexico studies are almost the only human work for thirty years.1971
ended earlyProhibition closes the file
DMT is placed in Schedule I under the US Controlled Substances Act and in Schedule I of the UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances. Human research effectively stops.
Schedule I is a claim about evidence as much as about risk: no accepted medical use, no accepted safe use under supervision. For DMT the claim was self-fulfilling, because the scheduling made the studies that might have produced accepted medical use prohibitively difficult to run.
The 1971 UN Convention internationalised the restriction, which is why the shutdown was not confined to the United States. DMT research did not migrate to a friendlier jurisdiction in the way ibogaine treatment did. It simply stopped almost everywhere at once.
Read the shape of this canvas with that in view. There are forty-nine years between prohibition and the first registered DMT trial in this database, and one research programme in the whole of that stretch.
1976-02
American Journal of Psychiatry
ended earlyThe psychosis model is assessed and found wanting
A review in the American Journal of Psychiatry examines DMT as a model of schizophrenia and concludes the resemblance does not hold.
This paper closes the era that Szára opened. Having spent twenty years treating DMT as a chemical stand-in for schizophrenia, the field concluded that the two states differ in ways that matter: the DMT experience is predominantly visual, brief, and retains insight, while schizophrenia is none of those things.
The model failing is part of why DMT went quiet rather than merely underground. Its main scientific justification had evaporated, its legal status made new work expensive, and no therapeutic hypothesis had yet replaced the psychotomimetic one. There was nothing left to fund.
1990-11
University of New Mexico
One programme crosses the prohibition decades
Rick Strassman doses around sixty volunteers with intravenous DMT at the University of New Mexico, the first authorised human psychedelic research in the United States in two decades.
This is the single bridge across this canvas. Between 1971 and 2020 there is essentially one sustained human DMT research programme anywhere, and it ran for five years in a general clinical research centre in Albuquerque. Getting it approved required a Schedule I licence, an investigational new drug application and institutional review at a moment when no US body had said yes to anything like it since the 1960s.
What it produced was foundational rather than therapeutic. Two 1994 papers established a dose-response relationship for the subjective and the cardiovascular effects, and introduced the Hallucinogen Rating Scale, an instrument the field went on to use for decades. A 1996 study showed something genuinely surprising: four closely spaced doses produced tolerance in the endocrine and cardiovascular measures but not in the subjective ones, which is not how tolerance usually behaves.
It is also the study that made DMT famous, through the book Strassman wrote about it a decade later, and the fame has not helped. The entity-encounter reports that dominate the popular account were observations from a physiological dose-response study, not findings the study was designed to test. The trials on the right-hand side of this canvas are still working out how to handle them.
2005-11
Pharmacopsychiatry
A European laboratory picks it up briefly
A double-blind crossover study compares DMT with S-ketamine in healthy volunteers, one of very few controlled human DMT studies between Strassman and 2020.
German and Swiss groups kept a thin line of controlled psychedelic work running through the 1990s and 2000s, mostly in the service of the model-psychosis question. This study set DMT against S-ketamine, a dissociative anaesthetic that produces a different kind of altered state, and found the two separable on psychological measures.
It is a small marker on a nearly empty stretch of canvas, and that is the point of including it. Between 1996 and 2019 the DMT literature in this database is dominated by pharmacology reviews, survey work and preclinical studies. Controlled human dosing barely happened.
2019-11
Imperial College London
Neuroimaging arrives before the clinical trials do
An EEG study maps the neural signature of intravenous DMT, and the compound acquires a modern mechanistic literature a year before its first registered trial.
The short duration that makes DMT commercially attractive also makes it an unusually good research tool. A fifteen-minute experience fits inside a scanner session, can be repeated within a single visit, and has a sharply defined onset and offset that let you line up brain measures against the moment-to-moment report. Almost nothing else in this field permits that.
So the neuroscience got there first. This 2019 EEG work, followed by a travelling-waves analysis in 2020, established the pattern that a combined EEG and fMRI study would develop in 2023. By the time the first trial in this database opened, DMT already had a better-characterised acute brain signature than several compounds that had been in clinical development for years.
Worth being clear about what that does and does not buy. Knowing what the brain does during the experience is not evidence that the experience helps anybody. The two questions run on separate tracks on this canvas, and the science lane is a long way ahead of the clinical one.
Into the clinic
2020 to 2025A clinical wave compressed into five years, built on a very short dose.2020-10
University of Exeter
The first registered DMT trial
UNITy tests whether DMT changes drinking behaviour in alcohol use disorder, and studies the neuroplasticity that might explain it. Eighty-nine years after the synthesis.
The clinical record for DMT starts here, in October 2020, and it starts with a hard indication rather than an easy one. Alcohol use disorder is a condition where the standard of care is weak, relapse is the norm and the placebo response is large, which makes it a demanding place to look for a signal.
The design pairs the behavioural question with a mechanistic one, asking not only whether drinking falls but whether markers of neuroplasticity move with it. That is the hypothesis underneath most of the modern psychedelic field: that a brief pharmacological event opens a window in which learning is easier, and that the therapy rather than the drug does the work inside it.
It is also the longest-running study on this canvas, listed to complete at the end of 2027. Seven years for a single academic trial is a fair measure of how difficult this work remains even after the compound has become fashionable.
2021-04
PharmaDrug
The first orphan drug designation for a psychedelic
The FDA grants DMT orphan drug designation for ischaemia-reperfusion injury in organ transplantation, a use that has nothing to do with the psychedelic effect.
DMT binds the sigma-1 receptor, a chaperone protein involved in how cells handle stress, and preclinical work suggests that engagement protects tissue deprived of oxygen. That is a completely separate pharmacology from the 5-HT2A agonism responsible for the visionary state, and it points at a completely separate set of indications: stroke, traumatic brain injury, organ preservation.
Orphan designation is a regulatory incentive rather than a scientific verdict. It confers seven years of market exclusivity and reduced fees for a drug targeting a small population, and it is granted on plausibility, not on evidence of benefit. Reading it as approval would be a mistake.
It is still a notable marker, because it was the first such designation for any psychedelic compound and it established that DMT could be developed on a non-psychedelic rationale. Two companies took that route. Neither is still pursuing it with any urgency, as the 2026 marker further right on this canvas records.
2021-04
Small Pharma Ltd
The commercial thesis enters the clinic
Small Pharma opens a Phase 1/2a of SPL026, an intravenous DMT fumarate, in healthy volunteers and patients with major depressive disorder.
Here is the argument the whole commercial lane rests on. A psilocybin session occupies six to eight hours, two therapists and a dedicated room, and that cost is the reason psychedelic therapy is hard to fit into a health system. An intravenous DMT session lasts minutes. If the antidepressant effect survives the compression, the economics change completely.
SPL026 was the first serious test of that proposition. Small Pharma ran it as an integrated programme rather than a single study: healthy-volunteer safety first, then patients, then a follow-on asking whether the effect survives concurrent SSRI treatment, which matters enormously because most people with depression who would be offered this are already taking one.
The proposition remains unproven, and it is worth naming what could break it. Antidepressant response to psychedelics may depend on the duration of the experience rather than merely on its occurrence. A shorter session leaves less room for the psychological work that most protocols treat as the active ingredient. Nobody has yet run the head-to-head study that would settle it.
2021-07
University of Basel
Basel starts the dose-response work
Matthias Liechti’s pharmacology group in Basel opens the first of six DMT studies, establishing dose-response and infusion behaviour in healthy participants.
Six of the twenty-five DMT trials in this database come from one laboratory. The Basel group has run bolus dosing, continuous infusion, self-guided titration, an analgesic study, a direct comparison against LSD and psilocybin, and a design that masks the experience with propofol. No other centre has anything approaching that coverage.
The value of a single group doing this is comparability. When dose-response curves for DMT, LSD, psilocybin and mescaline come out of the same unit using the same instruments and the same volunteers, you can actually compare them, which you cannot do across a scattered literature with different scales and different populations.
Yale opened a dose-escalation study in the same year, and later moved to alcohol use disorder. Between them these two groups carry most of the non-commercial human DMT pharmacology of the decade.
2022-06
Biomind Labs
Inhaled DMT is tested formally
Biomind Labs runs a Phase 1 of BMND01, an inhaled DMT candidate, moving the compound off the intravenous line and towards something a clinic could administer.
Intravenous dosing is precise and it is also a cannula, a pump and a trained hand. Inhalation removes all of that, at the cost of the control an infusion gives you: absorption varies with technique, and the dose that reaches the blood is harder to know.
The delivery question is not a footnote to the DMT story, it is most of the commercial story. If the argument is that this compound fits inside a routine appointment, then the route has to fit inside a routine appointment too. Everything in this lane, inhaled, vaporised and later buccal, is an attempt to make the administration as short as the experience.
Results were published in European Neuropsychopharmacology in 2024, reporting the candidate safe and tolerable in healthy volunteers. Safety in healthy volunteers is the lowest bar in clinical development, and clearing it says nothing about whether the drug treats anything.
2022-06
Small Pharma Ltd
A deuterated version follows
SPL028, a deuterated DMT fumarate, enters Phase 1 by intravenous and intramuscular routes in healthy volunteers and patients with depression.
Deuteration replaces specific hydrogen atoms with deuterium, which the metabolising enzymes break more slowly. The result is a molecule that behaves like DMT but lasts longer and produces less variable blood levels, and, not incidentally, one that can be patented in a way that plain DMT cannot.
That second point is doing a lot of work across this whole canvas. DMT itself is a ninety-year-old molecule in the public domain, so a company cannot own it. Deuterated analogues, new salts, novel delivery devices and engineered tryptamines are all, among other things, answers to the question of what a sponsor can actually protect.
An intramuscular arm matters practically. If the drug can be given as an injection rather than an infusion, the appointment gets shorter again and the equipment list gets shorter with it.
2022-06
Neuropsychopharmacology
First depression data reach print
An exploratory report covers dose-related safety, tolerability and efficacy of intravenous DMT in healthy volunteers and in major depressive disorder.
This is the paper that made the short-duration case look plausible rather than merely clever. It reports dose-related safety and tolerability alongside an efficacy signal in patients, which is what a Phase 1/2a is supposed to produce and what most compounds at this stage fail to.
Exploratory is the operative word. Small samples, open questions about blinding, and an efficacy read that was never powered to be definitive. In psychedelic research the gap between a promising early signal and a controlled replication has repeatedly turned out to be wide, and treating an exploratory readout as proof of concept is how the field keeps disappointing itself.
A companion pharmacokinetic paper published the same year characterised how DMT fumarate behaves in the body, and a 2023 modelling study went on to derive infusion rates that hold the experience at a target intensity. That kind of work is unglamorous and it is what turns a drug into a dosing protocol.
2023-03
PNAS
The brain under DMT is mapped in two modalities at once
A combined EEG and fMRI study in PNAS describes what happens to cortical hierarchy and connectivity across a DMT experience.
This is the most cited modern DMT paper in the database and the clearest statement of what the compound does to the brain: a collapse in the ordinary hierarchy of cortical organisation, with association cortex decoupling from its usual constraints while sensory areas become more strongly connected across the whole brain.
The methodological point is as interesting as the result. Recording EEG and fMRI simultaneously through an experience that starts and ends within a scanner run is only possible because DMT is short. Researchers have effectively been given a controlled on-off switch for the psychedelic state, and a great deal of the mechanistic literature since has been built on that affordance.
What it does not tell you is whether any of this is therapeutic. A description of the acute state is a description of the acute state. Two years later, papers using connectome harmonics and network control energy were still refining the same picture, and the clinical lane below had still produced no controlled efficacy result.
2023-05
Translational Psychiatry
A randomised placebo-controlled acute study
Basel publishes randomised, placebo-controlled acute effects of intravenous DMT in healthy participants, giving the pharmacology a controlled baseline.
Most of what the field knew about DMT effects up to this point came from open-label dosing, where everyone knows what has been given. This study put the acute effects on a randomised, placebo-controlled footing in healthy volunteers, which is the reference dataset a later efficacy trial needs in order to interpret anything.
Blinding a psychedelic is close to impossible, and the field has begun to admit it: a 2026 systematic review of blinding integrity in psychedelic trials found the problem pervasive. With DMT the difficulty is acute, because the onset is so abrupt that participants know within seconds. The Basel group has since tried masking the experience with propofol, which is either an elegant solution or a demonstration of how far you have to go to get a real placebo comparison.
2023-10
Journal of Psychopharmacology
The short duration is deliberately undone
An extended-infusion study holds the DMT state for far longer than a bolus, testing whether the compound’s defining feature is actually a constraint.
If DMT is attractive because it is brief, this study asks the obvious counter-question: what if brevity is the problem? By infusing continuously rather than dosing once, researchers can hold a participant in the psychedelic state for as long as the protocol allows, and find out whether the therapeutic content of the experience needs time.
It is an unusually honest piece of work, because it undercuts the commercial premise of half the canvas. Basel followed with a self-guided titration design in 2024 in which participants controlled their own infusion rate, which is closer still to asking what duration people actually want.
Nobody yet knows the answer. The extended-infusion and short-bolus approaches are being developed in parallel by different sponsors with different incentives, and no trial has compared them for clinical outcome.
2023-12
Cybin
Small Pharma is acquired
Cybin acquires Small Pharma, taking custody of SPL026 and SPL028 and consolidating the leading intravenous DMT portfolio into a larger listed company.
Consolidation is what happens when a sector runs short of capital, and the psychedelic biotech sector was running very short by the end of 2023. Small Pharma had the most advanced DMT clinical package in existence and not enough money to take it into Phase 2b on its own.
For the compound this is neutral news dressed as good news. A larger balance sheet is genuinely helpful, but an acquired programme also has to compete for priority inside a portfolio, and Cybin’s attention has been substantially occupied by its psilocybin analogue. The DMT assets have moved more slowly since the deal than the pre-acquisition pace would have predicted.
This is worth watching rather than judging. Blossom has no post-acquisition SPL026 trial record, which is either a pause or a gap in the registry. Both are possible and the difference matters.
2024-03
Helus Pharma
A deuterated analogue enters Phase 2 in anxiety
CYB004 is tested in generalised anxiety disorder with depressive symptoms, the first Phase 2 of a DMT analogue in an anxiety indication.
Anxiety is a departure. Almost everything else on this canvas targets depression, addiction or neurological injury, and generalised anxiety disorder has largely been left to the SSRIs and to therapy. Choosing it signals a sponsor looking for space rather than following the crowd.
The candidate is a deuterated DMT, so this milestone sits in the analogues lane rather than with the parent compound. Thirty-six participants completed enrolment in September 2025, which is a proof-of-concept sample: large enough to see a substantial effect, far too small to rule one out.
The programme has also changed hands, moving to Helus Pharma. Ownership changes at this stage are common and are usually about capital rather than science, but they add delivery risk to a readout that was already exploratory.
2025-03
AtaiBeckley
DMT as a film that dissolves in the cheek
ELUMINA doses the first patient with VLS-01, a buccal film formulation of DMT, in a multi-site Phase 2 in treatment-resistant depression.
A buccal film needs no needle, no inhaler and no clinician trained on either. If it works, it removes the last piece of specialist equipment from a DMT session, and the appointment becomes a room, a supervisor and a strip of film.
It is also the largest DMT-family trial on this canvas, at around one hundred and forty patients across multiple US sites, with two doses two weeks apart. Scale of that kind is what separates a proof of concept from a programme that could support a licence application, and no earlier DMT study has come close to it.
Company guidance has pointed at a topline readout in the fourth quarter of 2026. It would be the first properly powered efficacy result for anything in the DMT family, and the first real test of whether a compressed session can carry an antidepressant effect.
2025-04
Neuropsychopharmacology
Vaporised DMT reports an antidepressant signal
A Phase 2a in treatment-resistant depression reports rapid and sustained antidepressant effects from vaporised DMT, the first efficacy readout for the compound itself.
Five years after the first registered trial, DMT has an efficacy result. It is Phase 2a, so it is small and exploratory, and it reports both rapid onset and effects that persist beyond the day of dosing, which is the pattern the whole field is looking for and rarely finds in a single study.
Treatment-resistant depression is a demanding population and a forgiving one at the same time. Demanding, because these patients have already failed several adequate trials of standard treatment. Forgiving, because expectancy runs high in people who have exhausted the alternatives and know they are receiving something novel, and an unblinded psychedelic maximises that.
A companion randomised double-blind study of vaporised DMT published two months later gives the safety and subjective-effects picture from a controlled design. Read together, the two make a reasonable case for proceeding, and no case at all for concluding.
2025-05
Algernon Pharmaceuticals
A dose below the psychedelic threshold
A six-hour continuous DMT infusion in twenty-nine healthy volunteers reaches plasma levels associated with neuroplasticity without producing psychedelic effects.
This is the strongest evidence on the canvas for a proposition the field argues about constantly: that the neuroplastic effect and the subjective effect can be separated. The infusion held plasma concentrations at roughly the level preclinical work associates with plasticity, for six hours, in volunteers who did not experience a psychedelic state.
If it holds, the implications are large and awkward. A sub-psychedelic infusion could be given in a stroke unit to a patient who cannot consent to a psychedelic experience, which is exactly the population the stroke indication requires. It also removes the therapist, the preparation, the integration and most of the cost.
Two cautions. Reaching a plasma concentration is not the same as producing plasticity, which was not measured directly in humans here. And a Phase 1 in healthy volunteers tells you nothing about recovery after a stroke. The Phase 2a in stroke patients that would answer that has been planned since 2025 and has not started.
2025-09
Enveric Biosciences
A non-hallucinogenic tryptamine reaches the IND stage
EB-003, designed to produce DMT-level neuroplasticity without hallucinogenic effects, completes two-species toxicology and is told by the FDA to proceed straight to an IND.
The engineered-tryptamine lane exists to answer a commercial problem rather than a scientific one. A drug that requires a supervised session cannot be prescribed at scale, and a molecule in the public domain cannot be owned. A patentable tryptamine that works without a session solves both at once.
EB-003 is aimed at that target, with a dual 5-HT2A and 5-HT1B profile and preclinical data in a PTSD model. The FDA advising a sponsor to skip the pre-IND meeting is a genuine signal that the preclinical package is considered complete, and it is not a comment on whether the compound will work.
The company held around $4.7m at the end of 2025 against a Phase 1 that will cost considerably more. That gap, rather than the pharmacology, is the most likely thing to determine whether this programme reaches a human being.
2025-10
AbbVie
A large pharmaceutical company acquires a short-acting tryptamine
AbbVie completes its acquisition of Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals and bretisilocin (GM-2505) for up to $1.2bn, after a Phase 2a in depression.
This is the largest capital event anywhere near the DMT record, and it is not for DMT. Bretisilocin is a short-acting 5-HT2A agonist built to keep the antidepressant effect inside a compressed session, which is the same thesis that drives the intravenous lane above, pursued with a molecule a company can own outright.
The Phase 2a it was bought on reported a 21.6-point MADRS improvement at day fourteen against 12.1 for a low-dose comparator, in forty patients with major depressive disorder. That is a strong result at that scale, and forty patients is a very small number on which to price a billion-dollar deal.
What it tells you about DMT is indirect but real. Large pharmaceutical capital has now validated the short-session thesis, and it has done so by buying a proprietary analogue rather than the compound this canvas is about. That is the same pattern the ibogaine timeline shows: the money goes where the patent is.
Testing the bet
2026 onwardsReadouts, an acquisition, and whether a psychedelic can fit an appointment.2026-03
Helus Pharma
The anxiety readout arrives
Topline data from the Phase 2 of the deuterated DMT analogue in generalised anxiety disorder are reported on company guidance.
Blossom’s record marks this readout as delivered in the first quarter of 2026. What it does not yet contain is a peer-reviewed publication or a registry results posting, and until one of those appears the finding exists only as a company statement.
That distinction is worth holding on to across this whole canvas. Company-reported topline data have a poor record of surviving contact with a full dataset, not because sponsors lie but because the framing is chosen before the scrutiny arrives. Blossom lists it because it happened, not because it is established.
2026-03
Translational Psychiatry
Bolus dosing gets its dose-response curve
A double-blind randomised comparison against open-label escalation characterises the pharmacokinetics and acute effects of intravenous bolus DMT.
Bolus dosing, a single rapid injection rather than an infusion, is the format most likely to reach a clinic, and until this study its dose-response relationship in a controlled design was not well described. The paper also does something the field rarely bothers with: it compares a blinded randomised administration against an open-label escalation in the same programme, which shows directly how much the design shapes the result.
A systematic review of psychedelic pharmacokinetics published two months later pulls this work into a comparative frame across compounds. Between them, the two papers mean that the basic pharmacology of DMT is now better documented than its clinical usefulness, which is an accurate description of where the compound stands in the middle of 2026.
2026-03
Algernon Pharmaceuticals
ended earlyThe sub-psychedelic bet goes quiet
Algernon proposes renaming itself and pivots to Alzheimer’s imaging, calling AP-188 a legacy programme. PharmaDrug had already put its orphan-designated DMT programme under strategic review.
Both companies pursuing DMT on a non-psychedelic rationale have now stepped back from it. PharmaDrug’s board opened a strategic review in mid-2025 and redirected clinical resources to an antiviral and to botanical drugs, leaving the orphan designation from 2021 attached to a programme nobody is running. Algernon proposed a second corporate rename in March 2026, alongside a share consolidation and the launch of a diagnostic imaging business, and described its DMT stroke asset as a legacy programme it would continue to advance.
Legacy is a word worth translating. It means the asset is still owned and no longer prioritised, which in a small listed company with limited cash usually means the Phase 2a does not happen.
Nothing here is a scientific verdict. The six-hour infusion data from 2025 are unaffected by a corporate rename, and the sigma-1 hypothesis is as plausible as it was. This is the same failure mode the ibogaine canvas shows: a small company on a public market runs out of runway before it can find out whether it was right.
2026-08
plannedInhaled DMT opens a Phase 2 in depression
A Phase 2 of inhaled DMT for major depressive disorder is listed to begin, running to mid-2027.
The inhaled route has cleared Phase 1 and now has to show it does something. Registry-listed start dates slip routinely, so treat this as an intention rather than an event.
It joins the buccal-film Phase 2 and, if both report, 2027 becomes the first year in which DMT has more than one properly sized efficacy dataset in depression. Everything before that is exploratory.
2027-12
University of Exeter
plannedUNITy completes
Registry-listed completion date for the first DMT trial ever registered, seven years after it opened.
2029-03
University of Basel
plannedThe propofol-masked trial completes
A study masking the DMT experience with propofol, designed to separate the antidepressant effect from the conscious experience, is listed to complete in 2029.
This is the cleanest test anyone has designed of the question underneath the whole field: does the psychedelic experience have to be experienced for the drug to work? Anaesthetising participants through the acute phase removes the experience while leaving the pharmacology intact.
A null result would be as informative as a positive one. If the antidepressant effect survives the anaesthetic, most of the therapeutic architecture around psychedelic medicine becomes optional. If it does not, the compressed-session thesis that drives the commercial lanes on this canvas has a floor it cannot go below.
DMT
N,N-dimethyltryptamine: the research journey