Cross-Collaborative Exploration of Psilocybin's Effects ft. Odilia Lu, Dr. Robert Malenka & Dr. Boris Heifets

Psychedelic Brain Science

The final episode of Season 4 of Psychedelic Brain Science discusses a recent preprint that gets at the heart of reproducibility in science.

Dr. Jaster is joined by Berkeley PhD candidate Odilia Lu, Stanford researcher and professor Dr. Robert Malenka, and anesthesiologist and Stanford researcher Dr. Boris Heifets, all representing the laboratories involved in the Psychedelic Bay Area Animal Neuroscience Consortium; Psy-BAANC.

Five laboratories performed the same experiments at Stanford, Berkeley and UCSF to test the acute and persistent effects of 2 mg/kg psilocybin on various behaviors that psychedelics have been proposed to affect in mouse models. Many of these methods have been featured in publications that have received a lot of media attention, but can be difficult to replicate.

This body of work titled “A multi-institutional investigation of psilocybin’s effects on mouse behavior” can be found on BioRxiv here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.08.647810v1