The clinical trial that set the stage for today’s fast-growing ketamine industry runs just three pages long and involved only eight patients. It was published, not in the New England Journal of Medicine or The Lancet, but in a specialized journal called Biological Psychiatry.
Psychiatrists at the Yale School of Medicine did the research. They were seeking to understand the basic biology of depression, and in particular the role of glutamate, a chemical that carries electrical impulses in the brain. Knowing that ketamine, an anesthetic, triggers glutamate production, they gave ketamine to patients with major depression.