Johns Hopkins, Yale, and NYU are teaming up to tackle a key bottleneck that will arise as psychedelics come to market

• Universities have become more open about their research into psychedelics in recent years.
• As psychedelic treatments inch toward regulatory approval, schools want to tackle a coming issue.

As psychedelics treatments move closer to regulatory approval, there's an issue looming in the industry: the lack of trained professionals who can handle such powerful compounds.

Psychedelics are mind-altering substances, and it can take hours for professionals to guide patients through the experience of taking them as treatments for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and severe depression. Experts like Dr. Stephen Ross, an associate director at the New York University Langone Health's Center for Psychedelic Medicine, estimate we could need tens of thousands of trained professionals when psychedelic medications come to market.

In recent years, top universities have begun to establish centers to study compounds like psilocybin and MDMA. Now, they're turning to address the lack of trained therapists, which they see as the next bottleneck that could hamper these compounds.

Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and New York University announced on Thursday they were collaborating to create a psychedelics curriculum for psychiatrists. A $1 million grant will fund researchers at the three schools over the next two years to develop a curriculum for psychiatrists and create educational materials for other medical professionals.

The collaboration is the latest sign that top academic institutions and the medical establishment are warming up to these compounds.

"A few short years ago, this would have been an absurd dream," Carey Turnbull, the president of the psychedelics nonprofit Heffter Research Institute, told Insider.

Philanthropists are funding the various parts of the psychedelics movement that need to come together

Turnbull and his wife, Claudia Turnbull, who are longtime players in the psychedelics space, spearheaded the fundraising effort. With philanthropists like Tim Ferriss, Bill Linton, Michael and Lisa Cotton, and the Evolve Foundation, they raised $1 million for the program.

Lisa and Michael Cotton told Insider they donated $75,000 to the program and had, over the past two years, donated more than $1 million into the psychedelics space.

"People who have gone through traumatic events should be able to have tools at their disposal that can help them live better lives," Michael Cotton said.

Psychedelics are like 'nuclear power' and need significant oversight

Roland Griffiths, the director of Johns Hopkins' Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, told Insider that he sometimes thought of his work with psychedelics as akin to working with "nuclear power" because of how powerful the compounds are.

Because of this, he said, there needs to be significant medical oversight built into the psychedelic model.

The goal is to have the curriculum certified by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which would create a pathway to make the program available to medical schools as an accredited specialty all across the country.

The program aims to train psychiatrists and the broader medical community

If it receives ACGME certification, psychiatrists will be able to specialize in psychedelic psychiatry, just as they would child psychiatry or forensic psychiatry. But that process could take up to a decade.

NYU's Ross told Insider it was "daunting" to think about the sheer number of therapists that needed to be trained to expand access for patients. He added that even though this program was geared toward psychiatry, its ambitions were broader.

The idea is that the program will be designed in a way so that parts of the curriculum can help train other healthcare professionals — like therapists, nurses, and physician assistants — and even be provided as material in medical schools.

Researchers are working to fill the gap that exists between psychedelics and the medical system

Dr. Benjamin Kelmendi, a codirector of the Yale Program for Psychedelic Science, told Insider that he saw psychedelics as having broad applications that will attract other branches of medicine.

"The gap that we're trying to fill with this program is to bring together the psychedelic expertise that's been developed at a number of places and bring it into the mainstream of the medical establishment," Dr. Christopher Pittenger, the program's other codirector, said.

"If all the psychedelic expertise grows up outside of mainstream medicine, then that creates a schism in the field, which I don't think is good for anyone," he added.