Businessweek Talks- Compass Pathways CEO George Goldsmith

mushrooms for use in treatment resistant depression. We're delighted to welcome to Bloomberg Radio Compass Pathways chairman, CEO and co founder George Goldsmith, who joins us on the phone overseas in Europe, Georgia. Is so great to have you here with us. We've been talking about your company since it was featured in Business Week magazine. How are you. I'm doing well, Carol, and thank you so much for having

me on. Well, it's great, it's great to have you here, and what a year it's been, and what a year Togo public Um. First of all, tell us a little bit about your company and how you came across this, because I do understand it's a pretty personal story. UM. Yes, it is a personal story, and I think that in many ways, so many interesting companies do for him that way. And so from our point of view, we had our son really struggled with mental health issues when he went

to university, like far too many young people do. We thought, how hard could this be? You know, they're good treatments and therapies. Yet the more he encountered, the more difficult it was for him to be recognizable to us with the side effects, and it didn't really help him. So we then started talking to lots of different people doing

our own research. My co founder and wife, he carried amount of dis guy as a doctor, and and in her own researchers she stumbled across psilocybin and philocybin research and we became really intrigued by this. Um. The other thing that happened simultaneously is the more people we talked about our own challenges that we were facing, the more

we heard from others about their challenges. And these would be long term friends who we've known for a while, but they never felt comfortable sharing their own challenges until we did. And that really led us to to understand that almost everybody has a story of you know, how the current system isn't quite helping enough people well enough, and that really inspired us to look at this research. We saw this promise and and the issue is how do we bring it to patients, not just bring it

into the next journal article. And journal articles are critically important, but they're necessary but not sufficient to bring this to patients. And that's really our academic well and I do you know,

it's interesting. I was doing some reading on this and that my understanding is for those, you know, patients and individuals who deal with and and suffer depression, that they're the existing treatments only really work for about seventy patients, leaving as many as ninety millions still struggling around the world. I think that's some world health organization. So it is a huge and I hate to put it in business terms, but we are Bloomberg. It's a huge market. It is

but giving great markets of suffering. But it is a huge market right in that sense. And so there's a tremendous amount of suffering and I think we've been pretty good at developing tools to ameliorate of that. But the is quite quite difficult because what happens is with each new treatment, those people actually have less and less likelihood to be helped by what's next. And there's been very large studies in the US by the National Studamental Health,

and we really have documentation for that. So if we have the opportunity to do something unique here, which is well do so what we do is we provide a very high dose of sulicybin and carefully controlled setting under supervision by especially trained therapists. So this isn't anything that anyone would do at home and um patients listen to a special soundtrack and they're really supported through this process.

And what happens is that afterwards, for many patients they experience an immediate reduction and depression that actually lasts for quite a while. What are research really looking at is well, who benefits not everyone, so who doesn't and what separates the people who benefit for a few weeks from the single dose for a few months of people who actually

have even longer experiences. So we've went to the FDA and actually we're operating now in ten countries dueing clinical research, twenty one research sites, and we're really looking at how do we do the real deep research to generate the information and insight we need to go to what's the next phase for US, which would be Phase three trials, and we'll be putting out on our Phase two trials about a year from now. So we've been really excited

about the progress. And I should say that the FDA has named your experimental treatment quote a breakthrough therapy, which is, you know, really wonderful to kind of get that acknowledgement, but it also means now you've got to do more rigorous,

more risk adverse testing. It's a lot of pressure, I'm assuming, and you've got to make sure you're working with the right scientists, the best scientists, the best clinical trials correct well, absolutely and absolutely and then even more so right because obviously there's a history here um as what we're looking to do is the highest quality, rigorous, most rigorous research.

The first support of Call for US was actually even before we formed the company, to speak with regulators players just to understand what did they think about this and what we were really struck by in all the conversations, and the breakthrough therapy designation is I think a perfect example of this. The problem is so big, and that's what you said, you know, there's such a huge amount of suffering here. The tools we have are good for some,

but not good enough. They saw this is the promising So what we found is that a huge amount of support. But we really have to get this right, and we have to get it right for patients, for their families and society. Just got about a minute. Then I've got to do some news and then we'll come back. But how big of a market opportunity do you think is there for compass pathways? Just quickly? Well, I think that what we see and since not obviously they're about ninety

million people suffering from so called treatment resistent depression. But to be clear, this isn't people who is not a

group of people who are resisting treatment. This is a group of people for whom are treatment stoke work and so perhaps you know, I think this is really really important, But that's just the start, because really what we're looking at is working on areas of mental health where people get caught in patterns of negative thinking or patterns of obsessive thinking that happens in other areas like anxiety or

O c D or other things. And we're really curious about how could this mechanism of a high dose of psilocybin therapy yield benefit for other classes of people who aren't helped enough. So is this like a potentially a multibillion dollar rug potential just quickly, just got about fifteen seconds here. Um, Well, I think that it is potential to have it be a therapy. It's really important that it's not a drug drugs. It's given in constant combination

with psychological support and that's the critical pick. Hey, So before I move on, though, you did say and I thought this was a really important distinction, George, as you said, it's not a drug, it's a potential therapy. Having said that, I do think you know, our listeners are curious, um about how big that market size might be anxiety disorders to prench it the depression treatment market, it's expected to be something like twenty one billion. So what's your expectation

or thoughts on this? So a few things. One is I appreciate your digging into this. So just to give you some and your listeners some perspective, depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, just to pressure UM, and in the US, the annual call of depression is forecast to be about two hundred billions per year, and a large number of that is direct costs of out patients in patient medical services pharmaceutical services, and the number you've

referred to is largely in the pharmaceutical space. Now, what we know is that about a third of patients, as you mentioned, simply aren't helped, and the third of patients that aren't helped actually are about three or four times more expensive two or three depends on the kind of where where you're doing the data. UM. Then patients who are helped by these medicines UM. And so we have not only a very large group of patients who aren't helped,

but also those are the most expensive patients. And so if we could make a difference in their lives, I think there's a huge opportunity to really um develop a new model of care for them. And this is what's so interesting about what we're doing. It is a therapy, right, It's a single dose under supervised circumstances, with preparation and

then some follow up afterwards. And what's really unique about this So they did some really fascinating work at Johns Hopkins where a lot of this research was reborn in the over ten years ago, one of the questions they asked patients who had gone through this, and they asked this question six weeks after this experience. They said, how meaningful would you say this experience was in your life?

Personally meaningful? And people were given, you know, the most meaningful, the top five, you know, and so over seventy the single experience was one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their life. Right, So, you can't you can't really put you can't. You can't, you can't write no, no, no. And I wish you we were in person because you could see me smiling, because you can't put a value

on it. And I have a sister who works in this area, so I've kind of grown up learning about this, and I agree that there's an unbelievable cost by not you know, helping out this sector of our population. And also it's invaluable in terms of they basically their lives back. Having said that, you kind of evaded my answer. So there was this like a multibillion dollar potential treatment or

tens of Yes, I think it is multi billion. Yeah, um, and you know we've had so but again that's if the trials were well, what's let's let's talk about that, because that's a big deal. I mean, listen, we're all learning about the drug process right because of the drug approval process, because of COVID. What challenges does does the

US present, What regulatory hurdles still remain? And I do wonder if you're following kind of the playbook from marijuana kind of prescription first, recreational second, how are you thinking about it? Not at all. Now we're really thinking about the huge unmet needs there is for patients. Uh, And that's you know, what we're really focused on is access, and that means approval by medicaid, by you know, insurers.

So from day one, we've been really focusing on making sure that if this in fact is successful in trials, people have access to it. And that means working with insurers even in the design of clinical trials to make sure they have the evidence. Hey, this for this patient population. So that's super important to us. It's a different model than a recreational model. You're gonna have to come back because I want to talk more. We still have a few minutes, but I just want to squeeze in some things.

When when did you recognize the potential in this space? Was it after your son or was it when you started doing some digging, Like, what was the thing that you just said? Kind of the aha moment, Well, the aha moment was being awakened in February. Kacha and my wife, who is busy doing medical research in her sleepless nights as a doctor, and she said, I came across this thing called philocybin um. It's the active ingredient and magic mushrooms you can wear in the sixties and seventies. What

do you think of that? So say, what money finding this? And you know, obviously I grown up in that time, so it was familiar with these things, but it was just a whole world that I had completely forgotten about from that time. So listen, just got about forty five seconds left here. Why synthetic um psilocybin? And I'm just curious how you produce it? And just quickly yeah, sorry, pay we need to it's a medicine, so we need to know exactly what patients are receiving, what the doses.

It has to be the same quality every place on the planet that it's given. So that's why you have to use synthetic. It's the regulatory path forward. It's one where we always know there are no impurities, that people get exactly what it says on the tent and then

we can do controlled research. So it's super important that in a medical setting we use synthesize pilotybe and that's something that we've spent a lot of time developing and working with the regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to make sure it's the highest purity and genuinely a medicine with evidence. We'll just then the difference between a

drug and and a medicine is evidence. And so we're creating a atis in Frognis, which is psilocybin, a proprietary form of right and then with the evidence of the works. Got it, George, we have to go. Please come back. I'd love to learn more George Goldsmith and also listen to more of the trial the trials George, of course of Compass Pathways