NY's Lenox Hill Hospital With Cybin-Awarded Grant Will Provide Psychedelic Therapy To City's Underserved

Psychedelic therapy company, Cybin Inc. CYBN CYBN, recently announced it was awarded a grant for the first psychedelic treatment clinic at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital with which it will provide care to marginalized and underserved communities on Manhattan's Upper East Side. 

“Lenox Hill Hospital is excited by the potential of these modalities for the treatment of previously intractable conditions such as severe depression, chronic PTSD, and OCD,” said Dr. David Roane, chairman of psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital. “With this grant from Cybin, Lenox Hill Hospital aims to become one of the first hospital-based clinical sites offering psychedelic medicine in the country and is dedicated to addressing health inequities by prioritizing care for marginalized and underserved populations.”  

Headquartered in Canada and founded in 2019, Cybin has operations in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland and is focused on progressing psychedelic meds in therapeutic settings by “engineering proprietary drug discovery platforms, innovative drug delivery systems, novel formulation approaches and treatment regimens for mental health disorders.”

Cybin also announced that clinicians will receive training in the EMBARK model, a “transdiagnostic psychedelic psychotherapy model,” meaning it can be adapted to different clinical indications and problems including depression, alcohol use disorder and anxiety.

The company reports that it has adapted four different EMBARK therapy manuals. For example, one is a collaboration with palliative care specialist Dr. Tony Back and Ladybird Morgan, RN, MSW, program director and co-founder of the Humane Prison Hospice Project, creating a modified version of EMBARK to treat COVID-related burnout and symptoms of depression among frontline doctors, nurses and healthcare workers.

With regard to providing treatments to underserved populations, Cybin's chief clinical officer, Dr. Alex Belser said, “It’s time for psychedelic medicine to climb down from the ivory tower and into the community. We are honored to support this program at Lenox Hill Hospital to start a low-cost/no-cost psychedelic clinic for marginalized and underserved communities in New York.”

Equity is an issue that is on the mind of many psychedelic practitioners, as psychedelic tools can be time-intensive therapies and require costly clinician hours to prep patients, dispense meds and monitor them over lengthy treatments, as with psilocybin-assisted therapy, which can last five to seven hours.

Cybin’s Lenox Hill program will expand accessibility offering treatment with no out-of-pocket cost for individuals who would otherwise be unable to afford the service. Clinicians will receive training in MDMA-, ketamine- and tryptamine-assisted psychotherapy.