Compass trials mark a milestone moment for the psychedelics sector

Hello, and welcome to Pathfinders, a podcast series from RBC Capital Markets where we uncover the trends and catalysts shaping the fast moving world of biopharma and health care. I'm your host, Joe Colletti. In this episode, we're at RBC's Global Healthcare Conference here in New York, and we're exploring one of the most closely watched frontiers in neuroscience, psychedelic medicine. Joining us is Kabir Nath, chief executive officer of Compass Pathways, a biotechnology company developing innovative mental health therapies, including Comp three sixty, its lead psilocybin based treatment for treatment resistant depression. Kabir brings decades of leadership in global pharmaceutical and mental health markets, having previously overseen CNS and digital health portfolios at Otsuka. Kabir, thanks for joining us today. Thanks very much, Joe. It's great to be here. So you joined Compass with significant experience in global mental health. From your vantage point, can you talk a little bit about the core problem that Compass is trying to solve and how you articulate your company's mission? Great. No. Happy to do that. So I think as we know all know, unfortunately, serious mental illness is a problem that's been with us for a long time and is gonna continue to be. We know that rates of depression, PTSD, and so on remain stubbornly high. And while over the years, there have been a number of very good medicines developed, unfortunately, most of these work for some people some of the time. What we have seen and are starting to see now increasingly at scale is that some of these psychedelic drugs can have truly transformational properties for people living with serious mental illness for whom nothing else works. Compass was founded to bring the promise of psilocybin, one of the best known of those psychedelics, to patients. And what we're doing now at Compass is generating robust clinical evidence so that ultimately, we hope to move this through an FDA approval pathway and to get to as many patients as possible. There's been growing frustration, some limits, obviously, on how far traditional mental health care can take you. How does Compass fit into or more importantly, challenge sort of the current system? So fully agreed. What we are doing though is transformational and can really shift the paradigm of how people think about treatment. Today, if you are treated successfully with an antidepressant, there'll be some relief of symptoms, but people never say, I got my life back or I live my normal life. What we have started to see with psychedelics and their profound impacts is that not only can you get some relief of these symptoms, but for some people as well, you actually truly can get your life back. You can put these serious illnesses into remission for extended periods of time. We don't fully understand the mechanisms by which that happens still as with much else in psychiatry. But what we want to do is to make sure that we can actually bring this …