The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced an up to $4.9 million bet to advance the development of ibogaine for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses.
The potential funding will come over a five-year period from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and will include a focus on use of the medicine in veterans, according to a Nov. 12 announcement.
The agency said that future ARPA-H awards on top of the potential $4.9 million will evaluate ibogaine as a potential treatment for multiple substance use disorders too, including in opioid use disorder, with the goal to pursue INDs across multiple indications, "[r]ather than betting on a single path," ARPA-H explained.
Through that approach, the agency hopes to "increase the odds that at least one approach produces clear answers about whether ibogaine can be an effective, rapid-treatment option for Veterans and other Americans struggling with serious mental illness."
“Our U.S. Veterans and the millions of other Americans suffering from serious mental illness deserve more than one-size-fits-all, trial-and-error therapeutics,” Al Bugazia, M.D., senior advisor for special projects at ARPA-H, who is leading the effort, said in the release.
Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychedelic drug that researchers have studied as a potential treatment for opioid dependence and for depression and anxiety among veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Podcaster Joe Rogan recently discussed ibogaine in a conversation with the U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., noting that Texas had passed (PDF) a law to support studies of the psychedelic back in 2025.
Agency leaders, including Secretary Kennedy, claim that according to veterans, “ibogaine changed their lives.”
Researchers have been studying the potential benefits of ibogaine on PTSD, too. One group found that veterans who took magnesium-ibogaine reported greater intensity of “mystical experiences”—or an intense dream-like state associated with taking psychedelics—and larger reductions in PTSD both immediately and one month after treatment.
In April 2026, President Trump ordered the FDA to perform priority reviews of psychedelic drugs as part of a push to clear barriers to access to treatments for serious mental illnesses. This executive order allowed the FDA to give priority review vouchers to “appropriate psychedelic drugs”.
Shortly after, Compass Pathways and Usona Institute received national priority vouchers for their psilocybin treatments for depression. Transcend Therapeutics also received a voucher for its methylone PTSD treatment, TSND-201, which met its primary endpoint in a phase 2 study last July that showed significant improvement for patients on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.
The first traditional psychedelic submitted for FDA approval, an MDMA compound from Lykos Therapeutics meant to accompany therapy for PTSD, was rejected by the agency in August 2024.
While not a psychedelic in the traditional sense, Johnson & Johnson's nasal spray Spravato is a derivative of ketamine that was approved in 2019 for major depressive disorder. The drug is a dissociative anesthetic that causes patients to dissociate rather than hallucinate, but Spravato's regulatory trajectory may provide some framework for how formerly illicit substances can be repurposed into prescription therapeutics.
In today’s announcement, the National Institute of Mental Health also published a $20 million funding opportunity to support the development of a research network to study rapid-acting psychotropic interventional drugs, such as ketamine, esketamine, psilocybin, and other emerging treatments, for serious mental illnesses.