By Diagnostics World News Staff
August 21, 2026 | Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center are investigating whether immune-system biomarkers could help identify cancer patients most likely to benefit from rapid-acting psychedelic treatments for depression.
Depression affects an estimated 30% to 40% of cancer patients, although the condition may be underdiagnosed because patients are not consistently screened. Conventional antidepressants can be effective, but evidence for treating cancer-related depression remains limited, creating a need for faster and more targeted approaches.
Gregory Jones, M.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, and colleagues are studying ketamine and psilocybin, which have produced rapid improvements in depression in clinical research. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which can take weeks to work, patients receiving these treatments may begin experiencing relief within hours or a day.
The study, recently published in Molecular Psychiatry (DOI: 10.1038/s41380-026-03777-z), examined whether these rapid-acting antidepressants share biological pathways that could serve as biomarkers for future treatment strategies. The researchers combined cerebrospinal fluid proteomics from healthy volunteers who received intravenous ketamine with transcriptomic analyses of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). The cells were exposed to ketamine, a major ketamine metabolite called hydroxynorketamine, LSD, or psilocybin.
The team identified slightly more than 100 genes that were "convergently upregulated" across the four drugs. Several immune-related regulators, including interleukin-15 (IL-15), monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 and cellular adhesion molecules, were part of this shared signature. The findings suggest that these treatments may influence communication between the immune system and brain through a common neuroimmune pathway, despite acting on different brain receptors.
Additional analysis of data from a previous randomized, placebo-controlled ketamine trial found that increased IL-15 RNA levels were associated with patients experiencing depression relief. IL-7 also correlated with both clinical improvement and increased gamma power measured using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a brain-activity measure associated with neuroplasticity and treatment response.
To Jones, the goal may ultimately be to recalibrate immune signaling in a way that supports the brain’s ability to recover rather than broadly suppressing inflammation, as the findings point toward a more nuanced process of how immunology interacts with the mind.