Shroom-Therapy Startup Edges Toward FDA Approval
The feds have designated Compass Pathways’ experimental psilocybin treatment for depression a “breakthrough therapy.”
Just a few years ago, if you wanted to hear about the benefits of psychedelic drugs, your best bet was to head over to the parking lot outside the local jam band concert and flag down the guy in the tie-dye selling “magic mushrooms.” Today there are better options. You could, for instance, fly down to the Waldorf Astoria’s gated beachside resort in Boca Raton, Fla., and—between spa appointments and rounds of golf—take in the keynote address at the CNS Summit, an annual Big Pharma conference.
In November, that’s where you’d have found George Goldsmith and Ekaterina “Katya” Malievskaia, the conservatively dressed, middle-aged married couple running a mental-health-care company in London called Compass Pathways Ltd. Among other things, they were stumping for their answer to treatment-resistant clinical depression: synthetic doses of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in shrooms. “Our goal is to develop psilocybin therapy—the preparation, the support for the actual dosing, the medicine, and the follow-up,” said Goldsmith, a lanky, bespectacled sixtysomething former executive coach. “And then other clinics and so forth will buy and deliver that.”