Florian Brand, Co-founder and CEO, atai Life Sciences
Neil Markey, Co-founder and CEO, Beckley Retreats
Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, Director, Translational Therapeutics Lab, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine
Moderator: Siobhan O’Connor, Media Executive and Journalist


 Brainstorm Health 2022 - Business Trip: The Booming Age of Psychedelics In Health Care

Conferences

Florian Brand, atai Life Sciences
Neil Markey, Beckley Retreats
Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, Stanford University School of Medicine


Brainstorm Health 2022 -  The Booming Age of Psychedelics 

Florian Brand, Co-founder and CEO, atai Life Sciences
Neil Markey, Co-founder and CEO, Beckley Retreats
Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, Director, Translational Therapeutics Lab, Department of Psychiatry, Stanford University School of Medicine


Florian Brand, Co-founder and CEO, atai Life Sciences
Neil Markey, Co-founder and CEO, Beckley Retreats
Dr. Carolyn Rodriguez, Stanford University School of Medicine



Brainstorm Health 2022 - Business Trip: The Booming Age of Psychedelics In Health Care


All right thank you beth and let's get into it. This is gonna be a good one. I'm personally very excited about this conversation and to hear from these three very inspiring very different leaders in this space. Looking at what's made possible due to the shifting regulatory landscape around some of these compounds. Um The potential impact for the many many people with mental health issues that go unresolved from existing therapeutics seems to be the most compelling case. Now we know this and get controversial and no one here is suggesting. I don't think that psychedelics are ready for full mainstreaming just yet. Um So let's dive in Caroline. Let's start with you at your lab. The Rodriguez lab at stanford. Your focus is on hard to treat and poorly understood mental health conditions such as post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder hoarding and more now you're a psychiatrist, a clinical researcher and a neuroscientist. You've done pioneering research on ketamine as a treatment for O. C. D. Can you briefly share some detail about what you saw in patients with this work? Well my guiding star, my north star really is the work that I do with patients and what motivates and drives me every day is seeing patients that are not helped by first line treatment. And one of the first patients that I saw in my training was really struck by the fact that um when they entered college they just um this guy's named john um was bombarded with these intrusive thoughts that everything had to be just right and he had to write and rewrite his homework. Um Staying up late at night. He had to get up super early and put on his shirt and try different shirts until they felt right. And he ended up not doing well in school. His girlfriend broke up with him and he just really wasn't able to function. And uh john that turns out suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. Um That has these intrusive thoughts that increase anxiety and compulsions that decrease anxiety. And first line treatments for O. C. D. Are things like serotonin re uptake inhibitors like PROzac and cognitive behavioral therapy. And half of people be held by these first line treatments but half of them will not. And there's a long lag time. And uh Savanah got very interested in a compound called ketamine a dissociative anesthetic. And um at the time there was great excitement about drugs that modulate glutamate which is a chemical messenger. Um An excitatory chemical messenger that helped brain cells communicate. And I did the first study of Academy and an I. V. Infusion at low dose impatient with patients with O. C. D. The first randomized controlled proof of concept study. And we found that half of patients that got ketamine had within hours decrease of their O. C. D. Symptoms. One patient even said that it felt like it was a vacation from their O. C. D. And everybody had this like dramatic decrease in about half. Um Those effects persisted up to one week and so we've continued on to do an NIH funded study five year study. Um That just concluded and we're really excited to um to uh be able to put those results out into the world. I look forward to seeing them. Um florian. I know a tie is showing strong results both financially and in R. And D. R. And D also understand you came to this with somewhat of a personal story. Can you explain the gap you saw inpatient need um and the market and give us a sense of what you're most excited about in your pipeline. Um Yet to your point the reason why we started a tie is deeply personal. Um When we um when I was building a company with with a friend of mine who was also a co founder of a tie. He developed severe depression that turned about turned out to be treatment resistant depression so we have failed but the standard of care tried everything that was available or is available in terms of um pharmaceutical options. And he also tried um cycle psychotherapy approaches but nothing helped. So he had to resign. And ultimately one of our investors back then um also co founder of anti christian then pointed him to the studies that showed really great promise and therapeutic potential of psilocybin. Um Coming out of john Hopkins um an Imperial College in London and um that was intriguing to LArs and then long story short he was courageous enough based on this academic literature. Two in a country where it's legally available, have a high dose therapeutic psilocybin session. And after having tried everything for two or three years this really kind of was like a switch in his brain. He was able to process some of the traumatic experiences that he believes was where the root cause of his suffering. Um And this parrot then also with the realization that it's it's a very very enormous problem that we're facing in the back then when we started, it was already a billion people globally suffering from mental health disorders. Um And Covid unfortunately can the first studies show that this number will only grow um through through the the impact of the pandemic. And at the same time we realized that there has been this tremendous lack of innovation in psychiatry. So um really only since 15 2007 new neuropsychiatric drugs improved versus A little bit more than 80 in oncology. Those two together paired with a very personal experiences led us to start a time and yet we're a clinical stage biopharmaceutical company with 11 drug development programs anticipate to have 10 of those in the clinic by end of this year. And um uh we are very excited about every single compound. So we research and academic or one of the dancers are ketamine. Um and uh for treatment resistant depression looking at MGM A derivatives. Ibogaine, D. M. T. So it's like a lot of psychedelic compounds, but also non psychedelic compounds are less stigmatized, less vilified, but that we are equally excited about and ultimately want to pair um from like strong pharmacological agents with our digital therapeutics to achieve very sustained behavioral change in mental health patients, exciting time Neil. Now I know you also come at this work with a personal, with a personal story. Please tell us what led you to launch beckley retreats and what what's your hope for others? And I'm mindful of the clock. So the short version, So what Beckley retreats runs 11 week transformation programs with four weeks of digital preparation, five day intensive with two psilocybin ceremonies in six weeks of integration and we conduct these programs in Jamaica where psilocybin is legal and Beckley comes from the Beckley Foundation and we are partnered with the investment arm, Beckley Waves and Amanda Fielding is, we're just following her renegade footsteps and trying to help people in a real way. I got into this work after 6.5 years in the army Special Operations. That was a captain in the rangers. I went to Iraq once in Afghanistan twice. Um I ended up getting out and going to grad school at Columbia University and that's where I realized how bad my mental health was. Um I had tried a lot of different Western approaches, none of them really worked. And the thing that actually kind of opened the aperture was meditation And um I think meditation in a real way kind of saved my life. This was 10 years ago and that same year I had my first um experience with psilocybin but in a ceremony with intention and that was transformational. And so It's been about a 10 year journey working on these, working with these plants and these and these medicines. Um I went on to co lead the internal meditation program at Mckinsey and Company and it was interesting um to have this new way of understanding my own well being. But then put myself back in a high stress environment and my own well being started to slip. I started to actually see some of my own symptoms come back and I started to see some of this fight or flight that I remember from my time in the special operations community, you see it in the corporate environment. Um so that was pretty insightful to me and I ended up, you know, having a bit of a corporate career and then ended up unwell. And um I left a few years ago to focus on this work full time. And I think we're really just trying to help people you know, find balance in their lives and let go of uh trauma and um become better versions of themselves. Thank you for that. Um back to you Caroline. I'd like to know what you as a clinician and researcher would want to see before these compounds get broadly embraced particularly those therapies therapies that have psychoactive properties or mind altering properties. And you told me the right language backstage and I'm forgetting but um what would take us to get ready for that for that moment? Yeah I'm happy too. So I think um I would like to see as we were talking about just um greater understanding of the mechanisms of um drugs. So so there's a sort of classical psychedelics which have increased serotonin. Um but then there's ketamine which are disassociative and there is intact pigeons and pathogens which are things like MDMA. They have different actions. So understanding those actions will help to tease apart whether the side effects of these drugs. Um So ketamine for example has associated side effects. Is that necessary for its clinical effects or not? So that really divergent investment and resources and pathway depending on those questions. That's on the mechanistic side, but also the safety side. So um drugs like ketamine act on increased heart rate and blood pressure. We actually had somebody who was going to enroll in our research study and had a cardiac problem that would have been actually harmful for them to participate and they actually got curative ab related heart surgery to help them. So and then the other is um you know addiction some of these drugs more or less have addictive properties. So making sure that we're not giving drugs uh like that that have a potential abuse Two individuals that it could harm. Thank you. Alright for the last few minutes we're going to do a sort of crystal ball lightning round uh 5 15 25 years out. What's 11 or two sentence prediction of the role these compounds have in medicine and society Neil we're gonna start with you. I think they will have completely changed how we think about mental health and well being. And I hope that many of them replaced alcohol in our corporate lives and personal lives I think will be much better off for it. Thank you florian. You're next. Um Yeah I think to curlin points there's very good reasons that uh we do a very thorough rigorous clinical trials to ensure that those therapies are safe um and implications for the respective patient population and those child's needs time. We're with our most advanced program compass is developing the psilocybin assisted therapy. Were we had just the face to be read out. So so how far out is that? Like what it gives us a sense of a couple will need still a couple of years and they need to uh need they need still to run there. Phase three Program. Um and ultimately we'll need a couple of times to see the first the first um drug once we see from the respective data and it's cleared by the FDA FDA approved and commercialized. Um M. D. M. D. M. A. Assisted therapy with maps which is a nonprofit is a little bit further. So they I think just announced today that they have finished their enrollment of their second phase three study. Um So those two will most likely be the first ones. But for the other ones in our pipeline probably will will need a couple of years more again for good reasons. I can't agree more. I think we hope also that we see it through paradigm shift how we think about mental health and then hopefully those will be a key integral part in the mental health care system as unlike accessorize they often don't have to be chronically dosed but there's only with one single high dose you can achieve rapid acting antidepressant in fact in the case of depression and also very durable weeks if not months and anecdotally there has been very very long term sustained remission with those compounds are very excited. What yet. What's yet to come in this field? Thank you. All right Caroline. Yeah. Well I just want to say that I'm just really excited that we're even having this panel and just the tremendous excitement and openness. These drugs. You know our mind opening mind altering. Um that as a community, we really recognize the mental health crisis and that we need lots of different solutions. Um one size doesn't fit all. Um how do we um make this an additive endeavor And you know people who are coming for for this this kind of help. Maybe this is their first touch point into the mental health industry. So how can we all work together to really help those people who have mental illness, try first line treatments. But for those people who are desperate and in pain, give them the the informed consent, right? This is the limitations of our current research. We know you're in pain. These are some of the potential side effects. This is where we are in the field, have that transparent open dialogue and have patients really decide um what what might work for them but informed with with the science and and their own mental health. Their data. Wonderful. Thank you so much. We could have talked about this for far longer, appreciate it. Thanks everyone.