A team of American researchers has opened an unexpected avenue in the fight against one of chemotherapy’s most feared side effects: nerve damage. According to a study published in the journal Science, psilocybin, the active compound found in so-called magic mushrooms, showed in mice an ability to protect sensory nerve endings from harm caused by several commonly used cancer drugs.
Peripheral neuropathy affects a large share of patients undergoing chemotherapy. It can cause pain, numbness, loss of sensation or heightened sensitivity to cold, symptoms that in some patients persist long after treatment ends and can permanently affect quality of life.
In the experiment, mice given two doses of psilocybin before chemotherapy showed markedly reduced cold hypersensitivity and better-preserved touch sensation, without any measurable impact on the treatment’s ability to fight tumors. That last point matters: oncologists have long worried that a protective compound might blunt chemotherapy’s cancer-fighting power, and this study suggests that need not be the case.
Researchers linked the protective effect to activation of a serotonin receptor known as 5-HT2A. When that pathway was blocked, the nerve protection disappeared. Notably, a non-hallucinogenic compound that activates the same receptor produced a similar protective effect, suggesting the benefit may not stem from psilocybin’s psychoactive properties but from its biological action on this specific receptor.
The study also found that psilocybin helped protect mitochondria, the energy-producing components inside nerve cells, from chemotherapy-related damage.
Moran Amit, the study’s lead researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said the findings address a genuine medical need: a way to prevent nerve damage before it occurs, rather than merely managing symptoms once they have become chronic.
The study’s authors caution that these are early, animal-based findings that will need to be confirmed in human clinical trials before any therapeutic use can be considered. A logical next step would be testing the approach in chemotherapy patients, to see whether the protective effects observed in mice hold up in humans.
