Transcript
A (0:07)
I learned about you through Andrew Gallimore, who was on here, and him and Nunotics were working together on a project they wanted you to get involved with to figure out this endogenous DMT production stuff. I want to start by talking about that stuff. But before that, can you give people, like, a brief history of yourself, your background and your work and your expertise?
B (0:32)
Sure, sure. So thanks, first of all, for having me down here. And this is pretty cool. And it's nice to do this on a local trip, too.
A (0:39)
Yes.
B (0:40)
Because I come just from Gainesville, about two and a half hours up the road. I am at the University of Florida. I am originally trained as a pharmacist, and then I went to graduate school to go a little deeper into medicinal chemistry, which is really drug architecture, drug design, and drug. And my interest has always been in natural products and pursuing natural products for benefit of humankind, first and foremost, because nature, I believe, has put plants out there for us, other natural products out there for us on this earth to use to benefit our use, benefit our health, and potentially combat diseases that are also coming from nature. So I believe there's a balance in a ying and a yang there. But I've always been interested in more psychoactive plants. Really. The first one was in high school, and it was just caffeine, just caffeine from the coffee plant. And interestingly enough, I've ended more recently studying another plant in the coffee family, Mitrigana speciosa, which is the plant that produces Kratom. So we'll talk about, talk about that, I'm sure in more depth. But caffeine. I did a small project in high school looking at the caffeine concentrations in different sodas. This was before the FDA required labeling it. And so we, we found, you know, Mountain Dew was pretty high in. In caffeine content. There was an old Jolt Cola and sugar was really high. Oh, yeah, they're all.
A (2:20)
Remember Surge.
B (2:21)
Yes.
A (2:23)
I think they banned that.
B (2:25)
Yeah. And those are just. Those are good examples of too much sugar and too much caffeine. And that's a formula for wildness. And in fact, we were so goody two shoe in high school. Our Friday nights consisted of a case of Mountain Dew and we would just jam band in the basement. That's what we did. But moved on from that, went to pharmacy school and then got involved in research when I was in pharmacy school at Ohio Northern University, graduated, got my pharmacy license, practiced as a retail pharmacist. Actually worked originally for Publix Pharmacies. So I very familiar with how they operate and really enjoyed those interactions with customers. What we call them back then. Now patients is the preferred terminology in pharmacy practice. But from there I went to University of Georgia, did a four year old stint to get a PhD and I worked with chemicals there that were built to mimic a chemical called lobeline, which came from a plant called Lobella inflata, which was a Native American tobacco plant. So it didn't have nicotine in it, but it had compounds that we thought interacted with nicotine receptors. And we studied that, we did a lot of work, never really went anywh. But then I got an opportunity to do a postdoctoral, kind of like a residency for a physician. Do a postdoctoral stint at the University of Minnesota for Phil Portaghese, who is a distinguished professor of medicinal chemistry there. He was the editor in chief of the journal Medicinal Chemistry. But he's considered to be one of the real chemistry fathers of the opioid endogenous opioid system in terms of discovering compounds that would block the effects of opioids. So he defined that there are three opioid receptors. Before genetically we knew that there was actually three distinct opioid receptors. He did that through chemistry. And so getting training with him, working directly with opioids and opioid chemistry isolated from the poppies, we I got more and more interested, started my career in 2001 at the University of Mississippi, which is well known for natural products research. And when I arrived there, they had one of the largest repository of natural products samples in the country. Didn't have anything studied in the central nervous system. And I thought, man, this is a gold mine to walk into. They also have the, well at the time the only federally funded marijuana farm. And so we had this was in 2001. The marijuana farm actually predates the National Institute on Drug Abuse. So it was funded all the way up until very recently by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and served as the only source for studies that could be funded from the government to look at marijuana effects of marijuana. And so there was experience with very controversial plants there. They weren't shy for me to study what I wanted to study. And the first plant that came into mind was really Salvia divinorum, also called Diviner Sage or magic mint. It's a mint plant and it has probably one of the most potent hallucinogenic compounds ever discovered in it called salvinorinae. And nobody knew how this compound interacted in the body. And then Brian Roth, who's at the University of North Carolina, actually Did a full screening panel on it and published this amazing paper showing that it was highly selective for the kappa opioid receptor. Well, it was a total mind blow because every compound that's ever been described for opioid receptors has a nitrogen in it. Salvonor, nay, doesn't have a nitrogen at all in the molecule structure. And so it broke all the rules of what a structure had to look like or contain to interact with opioid receptors. And that's really what started us down that pathway, was how in the heck is this thing interacting with opioid receptors, particularly kappa opioid receptor, which is dysphoric in its function instead of euphoric, like the mu opioid receptor. So the mu opioid receptor is the target for things like morphine and heroin and fentanyl. And the kappa opioid receptor is sort of the yin to that yang that caused you to feel miserable. And in fact, they were developing compounds in pharmaceutical companies that were very selective for kappa opioid receptors way back when. And animals weren't liking those compounds. They wouldn't take them. But they gave great pain relief, and they thought they were onto the holy grail of very potent painkillers with no abuse potential. And then they started human trials, and all the humans ran for the doors after their first dose because it was so dysphoric.