Focal Points is the official podcast of Focalpoint Partners.
Focalpoint Partners is a venture capital fund that catalyzes healthcare breakthroughs by aligning people, technology and capital.
Focal Points is the official podcast of Focalpoint Partners.
Focalpoint Partners is a venture capital fund that catalyzes healthcare breakthroughs by aligning people, technology and capital.
Copyright: © Brom Rector and Empath Ventures
Will MDMA and psychedelic therapy be affordable? There are lots of questions about the economic and financial future of psychedelic therapies. How much will they cost? Will insurance cover them? And more fundamentally, how does one even begin to quantify the value of a psychedelic experience? Today’s guest, Elliot Marseille, PhD is here to explore all these questions and more. Dr. Marseille is a leading expert on the economics of the emerging psychedelic-assisted therapies. He is the founding Director of the UC Berkeley's Global Initiative for Psychedelic Science Economics (GIPSE), a network of health economists and health services researchers dedicated to realizing the potential of psychedelic therapies for high-priority mental health conditions. Through the application of policy-relevant economic analyses, GIPSE seeks to enhance the efficiency of service delivery, and increase access to these promising therapies. Follow Dr. Marseille's work: https://cghdde.berkeley.edu/projects/global-initiative-psychedelic-science-economics-gipse
Can Kanna, a plant medicine from South Africa treat premature ejaculation? John Boghossian and Dr Ryan Protzko from Kanna Health are here to educate us.
Can brain implants treat your depression? Ok, technically this would be a skull implant, not a brain implant - but still!
Jacob Robinson from Motif Neurotech discusses the future of minimally invasive electronic medicine from mental health and beyond.
This is a crossover episode from the Business Trip podcast.
Today’s guest is Samantha Tabone. Sam is a Partner at Focalpoint where she leads in-depth technical and scientific due diligence on Empath’s psychedelic biotech investments. Sam is here to help break down the due diligence process Empath uses when evaluating potential investments in psychedelic biotech companies. Empath's Due Diligence process is broken down into 4 pillars: Team, Intellectual Property, Scientific Foundations and Operations / Strategy.
Prior to Focalpoint, Sam served as the VP of R&D for PurMinds, a neuromedicine startup developing novel therapeutics for neurodegenerative diseases. As an independent consultant she’s led projects for leading psychedelic companies including Beckley Psytech, advised family offices on Life Science investment strategies, and worked as a temporary strategic director at several biotech startups. Sam has been fascinated with neuroscience and psychedelics (especially DMT) since she was in her teens. She’s most excited about funding psychedelic startups working towards solutions for complex neurological disorders. She holds a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Toronto and attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Pharmaceutical Sciences Master’s program.
Zach Haigney is the author of The Trip Report, a newsIetter that covers the emerging psychedelic science, medicine, and policy landscape. In this conversation, Zach and Brom discuss emerging trends, questions and hot topics in the psychedelics industry including:
We also discuss The Trip Report's recent acquisition by Beckley Waves.
You can check out The Trip Report here: https://thetripreport.substack.com/
Follow Zach on Twitter: https://twitter.com/zach_haigney
Follow Brom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealbrom
Make sure to subscribe to the show!
Sam Banister is a medicinal chemist and co-founder of Psylo. Psylo is an Australian psychedelic biotech company using machine learning assisted drug design techniques to developing novel psychedelic medicines to treat mental illness.
Sam is here to help us understand how new chemical entities are reshaping the psychedelic field; how novel psychedelic molecules are made, and how new chemical entities are going to play a dominant role in the future of psychedelic medicine.
Make sure to subscribe to the show!
Follow Brom on twitter: https://twitter.com/therealbrom
Follow Sam on twitter: https://twitter.com/samuel_b_phd
Brom's VC Fund: https://www.empath.vc
Highlighted Timestamps:
06:12 - Are next generation psychedelics taking over in 10 years?
16:10 - What is the process like for creating a new chemical entities?
50:39 - Psychedelics vs Cannabis: New drug discoveries
Mendel Kaelen is the CEO of Wavepaths. Prior to founding Wavepaths, Mendel Kaelen worked as a PhD and postdoctoral neuroscientist at Imperial College London since 2012, where his research was the one of the first to demonstrate music’s central role in psychedelic therapies. Wavepaths is a software platform that generates personalized, optimal music for psychedelic therapy.
0:00 - Why work on music and psychedelics?
3:30 - Highlights of Mendel’s academic career.
7:30 - Is there a universal “best” music for psychedelic therapy? How to design a psychedelic therapy playlist.
11:30 - What does the importance of music personalization mean for group psychedelic sessions?
16:00 - Should music for psychedelics be “familiar” to the patient, or novel?
20:00 - Vocals vs no vocals? It’s not that simple.
23:00 - Directive vs non-directive and concrete vs fluid music.
25:00 - Is the “right” music for psychedelics consistent across different drugs?
28:00 - How did Mendel switch from academia to startup founder.
30:30 - What is Wavepaths?
35:30 - Who is Wavepaths for?
37:00 - How do you sell music for psychedelic therapy?
39:00 - Surprising insights from Wavepaths customers?
43:30 - How does Wavepaths use biofeedback?
46:00 - Wavepaths direct to consumer.
49:45 - Startup life vs academia.
51:00 - Virtual reality and psychedelic therapy.
Tom Feegel is the Founder and CEO of Beond. Beond exists to help end the opiate addiction epidemic with safe ibogaine treatment.
In this episode Tom speaks on the severity of the opioid epidemic and explains how ibogaine assisted therapy can help heal those who are suffering from addiction. Tom gets into his personal story, how Ibogaine helped someone in his family, the economics of addiction treatment and Beond's plans to scale into a global operation.
➡️ Follow Beond: https://www.beond.us
⏰ Timestamps:
Disclosure: Empath Ventures is an investor in Beond.
Dillan DiNardo is the CEO of Mindstate Design Labs - a preclinical-stage biotechnology company developing the next generation of psychedelic-inspired therapeutics for intractable mental health conditions.
Mindstate's mission is to map the biological basis of the varieties of psychedelic experience, and to use that map to pharmacologically design therapeutic states of mind to be applied in medically supervised settings to heal the root causes of mental health disorders. Mindstate participated in Y Combinator in 2021.
Check out Mindstate @ https://www.mindstate.design/
What exactly is psychedelic therapy, and what does the research on psychedelic therapy tell us about its effectiveness?
In this episode of The Integration Conversation, Brom provides a description of what exactly happens during psychedelic therapy, and then goes over the three most compelling clinical research papers on psychedelic therapy.
Learn about how MDMA can treat Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, psilocybin can treat depression, and how psilocybin stacks up against SSRIs like Lexapro.
👇 studies mentioned in this video
MDMA for PTSD https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01336-3
Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994
Psilocybin to treat Depression and Anxiety in Cancer patients
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5367557/
Psilocybin for smoking Cessation
https://files.csp.org/Psilocybin/Johnson2017Smoking.pdf
Ibogaine for Opioid Dependence
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28402682/
In this episode of The Integration Conversion, brom give a broad overview of the psychedelic investing landspace, and addresses come common misconceptions about investing in psychedelics.
Topics Include:
⏰ Timestamps:
Doug Drysdale is the CEO of Cybin, a psychedelic research company developing novel delivery systems for psilocybin, next-gen psychedelic tryptamine molecules and performing studies on human brains under the influence of psychedelics using powerful brain imaging technology. In this episode of the Integration Conversation, Brom and Doug cover all aspects of Cybin's business, and answer questions like:
👇👇👇 Links 👇👇👇
📺 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/cAsFHlVLpeA
💻 The Integration Co Website: https:/theintegration.co
📝 My notes on psychedelic investing: https://brompersonal.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/broms-notes-psychedelic-investing.pdf
🎧 Listen on Spotify and other podcast platforms: https://anchor.fm/theintegrationco
🐦 brom on twitter: https://twitter.com/therealbrom
🎇 Clips and other stuff on Instagram: https://instagram.com/theintegrationco
💌 Email: bromtalks@pm.me
⏰ Timestamps: