An SF-based biotech company is working on a safer, reformulated version of MDMA, better known as ‘molly’ or ‘ecstasy,’ and we’re not tripping when we say they just won FDA approval to begin Phase 1 clinical trials.

We have occasionally covered Bay Area medical research into MDMA, the street drug known as “ecstasy” or “molly,” and perhaps a little too enthusiastically at that. But it’s hard to keep our serotonin in check over today’s news in the San Francisco Business Times that a San Francisco based biotech firm called Arcadia Medicine has won approval to conduct clinical trials on a safer and healthier version of MDMA, which in this case, could result in a federally approved drug that’s less toxic on the user’s heart and brain.

Arcadia Medicine, which is headquartered here in SF right along the Embarcadero, has some heavy hitters in the tech industry backing them up. OpenAI CEO and founder Sam Altman was their first investor, and they’ve got a total of $10 million in investment from Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and also Dylan Field of the SF-based interface design platform Figma.  

Sam Altman said in a statement for Arcadia that "Arcadia's innovative work in developing a safer form of MDMA is an important step towards a potentially transformative psychiatric treatment.”

Yeah, right, Sam Altman, you just want to do it at work! Come to think of it, so do I.

Arcadia Medicine’s “safe ecstasy” currently just has the lab name AM-1002. The company’s founder and CEO Nikita Obidin was a chemical engineering student at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who (of course) dropped out. He started researching the molecules in MDMA to formulate a version that was less potent, but more likely to bring on the social and therapeutic effects of the drug.

"What if we take this drug and reengineer it to make it not toxic to the brain or minimize its neurotoxic effects?" Obidin said in an SF Business Times interview. "It took decades to develop this in a regulated way."

It’s certainly a major landmark that Arcadia Medicine has won FDA approval to begin clinical trials, but the real approval would still be a long ways off. Phase 1 clinical trials mean that they can begin testing in humans, they’re beyond testing on mice or what have you. But the Phase 1 trails are likely to take at least a year, and Phase 2 trials would likely take at least two to four years.

You can learn more about Arcadia Medicine and their “safe MDMA” here.

Related: MDMA Gets Closer to FDA Approval, Thanks to UCSF-Led Project [SFist]

SUN VALLEY, IDAHO - JULY 08: CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at the Sun Valley lodge for the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho. Every year, some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful figures from the media, finance, technology, and political spheres converge at the Sun Valley Resort for the exclusive week-long conference hosted by boutique investment bank Allen & Co. (Getty Images)