Who Is Developing Ibogaine, and What They Have Delivered

This page is built from regulatory filings and trial registrations rather than press releases, because the gap between the two is the story. We give no investment advice, take no position on any security, and hold no financial interest in anything named here.

The census

Search the trial registry for ibogaine and you get nine studies, ever. Four are observational, two of those withdrawn or unknown. Five are interventional and two of those were withdrawn without enrolling anyone.

Industry-sponsored interventional ibogaine trials, all time: one. Plus one industry trial of the metabolite. That is the whole of it.

What the trials found sets out the registry in detail.

The one big trial, and what was reported from it

NCT05029401 was a randomised phase 1/2 study of oral ibogaine in opioid withdrawal, run at two British clinical research sites. It enrolled 116 participants and completed on 16 January 2024.

Its registered design has two stages: dose escalation in healthy volunteers, then a double-blind placebo-controlled stage in opioid-dependent patients with a withdrawal-severity primary endpoint.

No results have been posted, two and a half years later. And what the sponsor has publicly described covers twenty participants, from the first stage. Its own annual report says oral doses were evaluated in 20 participants, notes marked between-patient variability, and states that QT prolongation was observed at all three doses tested, with one participant reaching a corrected interval of 493 to 501 milliseconds.

What the sponsor thinks it is worth

This is where regulatory filings say things marketing does not.

When atai acquired the ibogaine programme outright in October 2023, part of the price was an earn-out of up to $8.0 million payable on milestones. Accounting rules require the company to carry that at fair value and to disclose the probability it assigns.

Unchanged at the end of 2024, the end of 2025 and mid-2026.

The disappearance is measurable elsewhere too. Mentions of the ibogaine compound in the company’s annual reports run 18, 10, 14, 3, 1 across five years. In the most recent, the single mention sits inside an accounting footnote, and the word ibogaine appears three times in the whole document: once in a risk factor and twice in accounting. The pipeline narrative is four other compounds.

A successor programme, an intravenous formulation announced in 2023 with a phase 1/2a study anticipated to start in the second half of 2024, has never been registered on the trial registry. It survives in a segment expense footnote.

The Lilly question, answered precisely

Eli Lilly has never filed a document with the securities regulator that mentions ibogaine. We checked the full-text search directly against its filer identifier: zero.

But Lilly is in this story, and not as an investor. On 15 July 2026 it signed a merger agreement to acquire AtaiBeckley, the company that holds the ibogaine assets, at $6.75 per share plus a contingent value right worth up to $2.50.

The contingent milestones cover two other compounds. There is no ibogaine milestone. Lilly is buying the company that owns the programme and paying nothing that depends on it.

The analogue that reached humans, and then stopped

18-MC is the compound designed to keep the anti-addictive effect and drop the cardiac risk. Our page on it sets out the pharmacology, which is genuinely striking.

Its owner acquired the programme in 2019 for shares valued at $5.5 million, and expensed the whole amount immediately on the basis that the assets had no alternative future use. It ran a phase 1 study of 108 people that completed in December 2021. No results have been posted, four and a half years later.

Then, in its own words in the annual report for 2022:

Following feedback from the FDA related to the additional requirements to enable the conduct of a Phase 2a clinical trial in the US, in the third quarter of 2022, we determined that any further clinical development of our MM-110 program will be subject to the pursuit of non-dilutive sources of capital and collaborations with third parties.

Spending on it fell 80 per cent in a year. Elsewhere the company describes the programme as paused, then as suspended.

And then it vanished. Mentions of 18-MC across five annual reports run 12, 3, 2, 0, 0. Mentions of ibogaine run 31, 1, 1, 0, 0. The company has since renamed itself and its pipeline is two unrelated compounds.

No answer about 18-MC is coming from the company that owned it.

What the metabolite programme has delivered

The metabolite deserves its own section for a reason that has nothing to do with trials. It is where the intellectual property is.

Of the 202 patent documents carrying noribogaine on the front page of the WIPO register, 157 belong to a single company, DemeRx. Across the whole iboga corpus, that company holds 196 of 365 documents, more than every other applicant combined. atai holds 16.

So the compound with the thinnest public human record is the one most heavily claimed, and the claiming is concentrated in one portfolio. The iboga patent record sets out the queries and the independent claims-level study that reaches the same conclusion by a different route.

One trial in this whole landscape has posted results, and reading them carefully is worth the effort.

NCT06480981 was a triple-masked phase 1 study of noribogaine in 55 people, completed January 2025, with results posted a year later. There were no deaths and no serious adverse events.

Its nine primary outcomes are all pharmacokinetic. No efficacy endpoint was registered at all.

And the posted adverse-event table shows a clean dose-response:

That is registry-verified rather than inferred, and it is the necessary qualification to any description of the compound as well tolerated.

In April 2026 the American regulator allowed a first US study of a noribogaine compound to proceed, adding its own caveat that this does not mean the drug has been approved or found safe or effective. Four months on, no such study has appeared on the registry.

The programme’s one earlier efficacy-adjacent human result failed: in 27 methadone-maintained patients, noribogaine showed a non-statistically significant trend toward reduced withdrawal, alongside a concentration-dependent increase in the QT interval.

Most of the rest is not drug development

Search regulatory filings for ibogaine and you get 292 documents. Read them and most describe something other than a drug programme.

Supply arrangements. One company holds an equity stake and a right of first refusal over a dedicated ibogaine supply; its only registered trial is a psilocybin study. Another announced it had secured naturally derived ibogaine in two forms and planned capsules; its one registered trial was withdrawn. A third has an earn-out milestone triggered by executing a future commercialisation agreement that does not yet exist.

Patent filings. Two companies jointly filed an application combining ibogaine with other compounds and announced thirteen related filings. Neither has an ibogaine trial.

And comparison. At least one company mentions ibogaine only to name it among the first-generation compounds its own drugs aim to improve on.

The smallest filer in the set, a company named for the plant, has raised offerings recorded at forty-eight thousand and eleven thousand dollars.

What has actually been delivered

The only completed and published human ibogaine work is academic and uncontrolled. Why there is no success rate covers what that means for the figures in circulation.

Can you buy stock in ibogaine?

Not in the sense the question means. There is no ibogaine pure-play of any size, and the question is worth taking apart because the answer is the whole point of this page.

No listed company’s value rests on ibogaine. The one substantial programme sits inside a diversified company, and its own sponsor assigns the ibogaine milestone a probability of 4 to 5 per cent and carries the earn-out at 0.2 million dollars. When that company was acquired, the ibogaine assets carried no contingent value at all, and a proposal to sell them separately was dropped as immaterial. Those are the acquirer’s and the sponsor’s own numbers, not ours.

The companies doing the most are not listed. The metabolite patent portfolio is held privately. So is most of the clinic sector.

And several companies whose filings mention ibogaine have no ibogaine programme. They have supply arrangements, patent filings, or a comparison in a slide. A search of filings for the word is not a census of the field.

We publish no share prices, tickers or valuations, and nothing on this site is investment advice. Those figures move daily and are available from any financial data provider. What is harder to find, and what this page is for, is what the companies have actually delivered.

Why this page exists on a site about a drug

Because the commercial story is now the loudest thing about ibogaine, and it is being read as evidence. A pharmaceutical company acquiring a programme sounds like validation. A regulator allowing a study sounds like approval.

The filings say something narrower and more useful. The companies closest to this compound, with the most information about it, have assigned it a low single-digit probability, folded it into footnotes, suspended the analogue, and given up the right to sell it separately because it was immaterial.

That is not proof it does not work. It is the best available read on what the people who own it believe, and it is more informative than any press release.