MindCure’s Kelsey Ramsden on Psychedelic Rollout: It’s Not Just Regulation; It’s Research
We had Kelsey Ramsden, President and CEO of MindCure Health Inc (CSE: MCUR), sit with us last month. In that interview, Ramsden shared a lot about MindCure’s digital platform iSTRYM and partnership ATMA. We’re pleased to have her back to discuss more about recent announcements, and delve more into the psychedelic research, particularly with ibogaine, that MindCure is in the process of devising.
Here’s some highlights from the interview.
Recent announcements regarding partnerships with LUCID Inc and Speak Ai for iSTRYM
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy incorporates a musical component, Ramsden says. It’s part of the set and setting. In the past weeks, MindCure has announced partnerships with both LUCID and Speak Ai to include the businesses into their digital platform.
The goal, Ramsden says, is that every component piece brought into iSTRYM is based on scientifically proven adaptations and improvements. MindCure hopes this will help enhance the effectiveness of therapy assisted by a psychedelic, with iSTRYM being used to collect data for further research in addition to providing a customizable experience for patients.
LUCID has an AI-driven music set, Ramsden says, that helps get their patients to certain mindsets more quickly and with specificity. With iSTRYM, MindCure enables therapists to drive that sentiment in session, recognizing every patient is different.
Ibogaine the target of MindCure psychedelic synthetic production, and research
Synthetic psychedelic compounds are required for research and clinical trials, and MindCure identified ibogaine as being an underserved market in the field. Besides MindCure, no one else is really producing ibogaine, Ramsden says, and there are a lot of people who want to do research with ibogaine and addiction. So it was a “classic business move” to choose that molecule to focus on, she says.
Research focus aside, anyone in the industry knows that it’s not a cheap endeavor to manufacture synthetic psychedelic molecules. You have to be tremendously disciplined and do a bit of prework, she says, to decide which pony to put your money on.
For investors in the psychedelic space, what should they know?
Ramsden says that there’s approximately 50,000 clinics in the United States doing some sort of psychotherapy, and she anticipates that 10% of the market will be early adopters, offering some sort of psychedelic therapy. From there, it scales up. With the tech platform able to scale globally, Ramsden says that MindCure can already get into places where psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are already being offered legally, collecting research data in places like Costa Rica, Peru, and Amsterdam.
But for investors, not only is the general marketability a question, other things may come into play. Right now there are 26 clinical studies involving psylocibin and treatment-resistant depression, Ramsden says. If 15% of those research trials come through, that’s still a fair number of companies trying to use mushrooms on depression. So some investors may want to look at molecules for indicators not yet flooded.
Lastly, they may have to ask themselves, how quickly are they likely to roll out? Ramsden believes that based on the research, MDMA will be the next psychedelic approved for treatment, though that will not likely be until 2022-2023 because before they can gain full FDA phase 4 approval, they have to finish a pediatric study.
“It’s not just regulation. It’s research,” she says. “These things, as much as we entrepreneurs want to be aggressive… research takes time.”
