The pharmacology of d-Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)

A doctoral thesis combined two research strands: developing LC-MS/MS methods to measure LSD and its metabolites in plasma, serum, and urine, and conducting clinical phase I trials to investigate the acute psychological and physiological effects of LSD in healthy humans. The analytical work established the pharmacokinetics of LSD and collected data from emergency toxicological cases. One LSD study included fMRI to examine neural correlates of altered states of consciousness and emotion processing under LSD.

Study at a glance

Abstract

My PhD thesis consisted of two different scientific parts, each supervised by one of my advisors, Prof. Dr. med. Matthias Liechti and Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Katharina Rentsch. One part was to develop liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) methods to measure d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and its main metabolites in plasma, serum, and urine samples. We established the pharmacokinetics of LSD and collected data from emergency toxicological cases. Therefore we have developed and validated two analytical methods using LC-MS/MS which resulted in several publications. All analytical work was performed in the Toxicology Lab of the Laboratory Medicine at the University Hospital Basel under the supervision of Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Katharina Rentsch. The second part included planning, conduction, and analysis of clinical phase I trials with LSD. We investigated the acute psychological and physiological effects of LSD in healthy humans what resulted in several publication. These projects were supervised by Prof. Dr. med. Matthias Liechti at the Department of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology of the University Hospital Basel. One LSD study included a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) assessment, to investigate the neural correlates of altered states of consciousness and emotion processing under the influence of LSD. The fMRI study was done in close collaboration with the team of Prof. Dr. med. Stefan Borgwardt from the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Basel.