 Welcome. We are here to talk about what I think is one of the most exciting ideas that is going to change our world over the next 10, 20 years. As you just heard, is the tantalising prospect that these psychedelic drugs are going to be able to treat a whole range of disorders? And we have with us the man who is leading the charge on this whole world and this whole new idea, Florent-Band, CEO of Attai Life Sciences, really exciting. Thank you. So could we start? Because I know this is obvious to you, but a lot of people here won't know the full story. Could you just give them like two minutes on where this kind of psychedelic research started, how it stopped, and kind of like why we are seeing this relayscence now? Sure. So psychedelics actually go back millennials in terms of how they were used by humanity. So there is interesting research going on, how they have been used, very, very many hundreds of years ago in ritualistic religious settings. So Brian Moresker, for instance, has written a very interesting book about this. It's research out of Harvard on the role in that element of society. And in the 50s and 60s they were actually very heavily researched in also the Western world for neuropsychiatric diseases and showed great promise already back then. But then in the 70s there was an immense backlash with the war on drugs that was announced by or implemented by the Nixon administration in the US that led to the scheduling of various substances, including psychedelics, meaning that they were classified as, basically that they were classified as not having any medical use, which made the research very, very hard then in the 70s and beyond. And only in 2016 with the mental health crisis becoming more and more evident. So now we have a billion people globally suffering from mental health disorders and really no innovation over the last 20 years. And in 2016-17 the openness from regulators again increased and also the research in the academic world increased. And there was this one or basically two landmark studies, one out of John Hopkins in Baltimore and one out of the Imperial College in London that really showed large effect sizes in patients suffering from depression and anxiety when treated with psilocybin in a therapeutic, psychotherapeutic assisted environment. And yes, since then that was also the roundabout of the time when we got involved in 2018 when we started the company to really help rigorously research those compounds next to the other drug development programs and digital therapeutics that we are researching. So what is it actually doing and how is that different from other people in the market? Like what's your part? Where do you sit in this psychedelic renaissance? Right, so we are biopharmaceutical companies. We are doing clinical trials in depression, anxiety and addiction primarily. Also focused on other mental health indications where these three are the core areas of our interest and where we are developing drugs. And we are really interested in anything that could truly mean a leap forward for patients. In our view, it's basically their personal reasons why it started with psychedelics, but we equally excited about other pharmacological options as well as digital therapeutics as I alluded to earlier. And what we basically do is once we identify an interesting compound, everything started with psilocybin, which is the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And we basically usually form companies around the compound and the IP and provide funding but also operational expertise. We have around about 100 people on the ITAI platform and they hands on work with the scientific founders that are focused on their own molecules. We have 11 drug development programs on the platform and we collaborate with those and jointly develop them through the clinical phases where you have those three and also are doing some preclinical work to bring those therapies to patients. A lot of these studies, there's a lot of numbers and trials that are large numbers of people that show that this stuff is working. But can you maybe talk about some things you've seen firsthand, some people you've seen firsthand that have really been helped by this? And how has it helped them? Why has it helped them? Can you kind of bring it alive for us? Yeah, so that is actually the very reason why we started ITAI. So I was working together with my co-founder Lars who was also a co-founder at a previous company in a completely different sector. And then through his suffering, so he developed a depression and had psychotherapy and tried, he also had anxiety so he tried benzodiazepines, he tried SSRIs and nothing really helped for him. The only experience is severe side effects which can be like weight gain, cognitive impairment, so and these are kind of the milder side effects that you can experience and it's really trial and error experience for the patients. You sometimes need to wait up to 12 weeks whether an SSRI works, an antidepressant works. So we really observed this terrible mental health patient journey if you have a patient that doesn't respond to existing treatment options. And we have basically 33% of people not responding to current options that are classified as treatment resistant like last wars. And then he, after he came across the studies that we talked about earlier on out of John Hopkins and Imperial that had so encouraging results, he in a jurisdiction where it's legal basically had a high dose psilocybin experience in a therapeutic setting and that really changed his life extremely to the better. So he was extremely depressed, went into the psychedelic experience, the psychedelic session together with a therapist and came out truly re-energized and was able to access the trauma that he believed to be the root cause and work through it and that was kind of a life-changing moment for him. So he had long-term depression, he tried lots of different things. He then had a single dose, high dose of psilocybin with a therapist and then now he's more or less okay. Is that what happened? For him it was really this one single high dose that as he puts it was a very curative experience for him. We believe that unfortunately that won't hold true for every single person so we believe there's not this one-size-fits-all solution so unfortunately psilocybin is not a panacea. In depression you have a very heterogeneous patient population so it's really depressions versus depression or anxieties versus anxiety. It's very individual treatment patterns of a patient and so we believe we really need to develop a diverse array of pharmacological or also digital therapeutics to address that very unique mental health issue in a very tailored way for the patient. I really want to get on to talking about the digital stuff because it's really interesting but can we just talk about why they think it works? Why you think it works? Why? What the kind of working theory? Is it like accelerated therapy which is fundamentally good and helps you work through core issues or is it actually chemicals in your brain that get tweaked for the better? Or is that too philosophical a question? I don't have a science background so full disclosure but in a simplified way psychedelic or let's take psilocybin as an example there's currently the hypothesis that two major factors are driving the efficacy. One is that it downregulates the default mode networks. You have different brain networks in your brain and the default mode network is basically responsible for the sense of self and there's also the reason why often you overly you have a rumination, rumination is I think the English word where you're overthinking stuff. You're thinking like oh why did I do this? What did I do wrong? So it's always very eco-focused, very much eye-centric so it's basically the sense of self and when you downregulate this one you're kind of also lower in a simplified way expressed kind of the guards in ways that allows you to access certain traumatic experience in an easier way that you might not be able to access if you're just having psychotherapy without the substance. And on the other hand it increases the level of neuroplasticity so how basically it helps new connections of neurons being formed and also it helps neurogenesis so new neurons can be created and that is very helpful in the phase after the experience so you have a two-week window of neuroplasticity where you can really successfully implement new habits which can be very helpful, you can implement meditation practices, mindful practices that can help you in the long term. So these are two elements that are assumed to drive the efficacy as we know it today. Can you tell us where we are on this clinical journey? Because obviously, I mean we've been talking about psilocybin but there's MDMA, there's Kretamine, there's DMT, there's Ibogaine, there's all sorts. When are we likely to get X, Y and Z? What's the time scale here? So usually in clinical studies you have three phases. Phase one is to research the safety of the compound, phase two is basically designed to show proof of concept so basically it works so you have efficacy and phase three wants to basically re-prove that in a larger patient population and with that data then you go to regulators with a data set and seek approval of that compound or treatment and then you seek also with that data the reimbursement which is very important for us as often the vulnerable, not so affluent groups in the population are the most exposed to mental health issues. And with Compass they are very first company that is researching psilocybin, so the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, they just published their phase two data which was very promising. We saw a large effect size here in severely depressed treatment resistant depression that was 233 patients that were taking part in the trial globally. And the next step would then be a phase three, so it's still a couple of years until we would have assuming that everything is reproduced also in the phase three that we would basically get access in the medical system. Like five years or what? Yeah, up to roundabout I think it's a reasonable assumption. MDMA therapy could be a little bit quicker accessible, so maps which is a very interesting organization because it's a non-profit organization that has been researching MDMA assisted therapy for over 30 years, so Rick Dublin is here, the thought leader in that space. And they published phase three data in May this year I believe and also very, very remarkable data showing that MDMA assisted therapy in PTSD, so post-traumatic stress disorder patients was very, very effective. 60% of the patients treated with MDMA in also assisted therapeutic setting didn't, weren't classifying as PTSD patients anymore, which is very remarkable. So that shows the potential but also here you have to do another phase three trial or they have to run another phase three trial and then it takes a little time to communicate with the regulators and to get it eventually approved. So also here a couple of years away still. So there's MDMA which is maybe the closest, MDMA for PTSD. There's psilocybin which is maybe a few more years after that for treatment resistant depression. What are the other ones that are maybe slightly more moonshotty and like when might be getting those if they work? Moonshotty in a way of more radical you mean? Yeah, like the ones that are maybe they have done, I mean those are both the most sort of tried and tested but like Ibogaine, DMT, etc. are there like ones that are further out that we... They're a little further out. So we have one other compound which is rooted in ketamine, S ketamine that was actually approved 2019. So that kind of also demonstrated that regulators are very much open for I guess pharmaceutical drugs rooted in stigmatized compounds. So this is a dissociative, this is not a classical psychedelic but it also falls broadly in this category. So that was approved, S ketamine, it's commercialized under the name Spolato. Also has to be taken in an inpatient environment. In terms of the next drug development programs in our pipeline, DMT you mentioned Ibogaine, here we are about to go in the phase one with DMT and are currently in a phase one actually in the UK with Ibogaine. So also here still a couple of years out unfortunately but we're working very hard to move this in as fast as possible yet responsible way forward. I was doing my research ahead of this and as soon as we done with Fox News and they'd said something along the lines of so you're going to give LSD to children, you're going to make all these drugs legal and you're going to ruin our kids and that was the kind of like, are you mad basically was the sort of tone? Yeah. Do you like, what's it been like going to regulators, I mean in the early days going to investors, Tai listed a few months ago but in the early days going to investors and talking about something that's pretty out there. Right. Yeah, I mean simple things like opening a bank account was very tricky in the beginning especially in the US because they're I guess afraid that it's somehow like cannabis and it's not fairly legal in the US so they were hypersensitive to this topic so they had to run through as reputational committees, et cetera. So there's a lot of stigma around those substances still pointing also I mean that's also why I guess the Fox News rather conservative guy was so aggressive in that sense to point out that this is quite controversial what we're doing but if you basically look at it, so we're in R&D, we're producing the data that is needed to demonstrate the regulators ultimately which is one of the stakeholders that we need to convince so we're taking very consciously a very conservative, science driven approach to convince all the stakeholders in this field but initially we had a lot of headwinds so also from the traditional biotech investors there was a lot of skepticism so for us it was very fortunate to have that we had a founder team and Christian Angami being one of one of those founders that he has a significant wealth through his first biotech and then he did a lot of investments after so he kind of, I think it was key that we had his backing to get through the first year to actually demonstrate that this is viable and we are not ludicrous and a lot of people said like guys this is a little too out there so there was a unique combination in the founding and the founder team that I believe led to the early success and allowed us as outsiders to the biotech world coming from tech which was maybe necessary to be as bold to move into this to help us through the early phase. So it was Christian who was the other founder, he had exited before, had money and he had supported the business in the early years and you think without that you may not have got the original money to even be able to prove that something was going on. Right, I mean traditionally in biotech you have a, it's a very closed ecosystem where you have like a handful of very strong BCs that kind of set the tone and then a number of key opinion leaders that set the tone, what's a viable investment, what's a viable mechanism of action and what's not and if they are not on board there's a lot of reluctance in this field. So in our case we had Christian with his own money and his network and rather Silicon Valley people like tech investors maybe not surprisingly coming on board including Peter Thiel and that then kind of helped us to make the first mile and with that data that we then generated and basically with the proof of also of our operating model showing that we are successfully spinning out in a company to an aspect that we are successfully able to partner with a large pharmaceutical company so basically that helped us to get there and that was then the moment also when academic research increased and more and more data was coming out that led to also the biotech community to buy in and they are in the meantime fully on board also launched other companies in this field that was yeah that was key. And when you talk to regulators are they like super conservative and skeptical or are they just like we'll look at any data and if the data is there gray if not not but we're not you know we're not skin in the game. Yeah no it's definitely the letter and they have been very open they gave breakthrough therapy designation so the FDA gave which is the regulatory authority that approves drugs in the US gave breakthrough therapy designation to Compass in 2018 and they're developing psilocybin and 2017 for the MDMA assisted therapy so there is definitely an approach that is very rigorous data driven and they're very open to look at that data they're not I guess scared away by the stigma so they were surprisingly and thankfully very very open to the approach they were taking. A few of the companies like yourselves who have gone down the for profit route have been quite controversial in the kind of psychedelic community there's a sort of world that I guess is like maybe quite anti-capitalist I don't know but like and there are other companies you mentioned maps which has been working on MDMA for a long time which is not for profit so you guys coming along was yeah was controversial how did you handle that like why did you choose the for profit route to begin with and also kind of how did you handle that backlash in the community. So we contemplated many approaches also including non-profit approaches in the very beginning but quickly realized that the fastest way to actually get those mental health innovations including the psychedelics to patients is the for profit model and the reason is that the reason lies in the fact that drug development is extremely expensive so you need hundreds of million to run one trial and this is very hard to raise from a for from a non-profit because it's there needs to be attached a certain R.I. to raise those those amounts of funds maps has been successful but it took them a very long time 30 years to get now to a faith through phase three results and hopefully to approval over the next years we believe that the for profit approach which by the way every other biotech company and every other indication in oncology is taking so we're we're in a unique position because there is the psychedelic community which is rather left anti-capitalist and there's this notion that this is a wholly molecule because it allows you to access the universe that God because a lot of people have very spiritual experiences on psychedelics that this is it's evil to try to make money with us on the other hand you need patterns in order to recoup the investment so we decided to go that way because we believe ultimately that's the most rigorous way it allows us to produce that data that is again as we discussed earlier required to convince all the stakeholders that this is a viable treatment and ultimately again also convince insurance companies to reimburse those treatments and yeah that's the reason why we picked the for profit and how did you deal with the backlash I mean was it just trying to continually like constantly communicate and explain like what was your strategy for that for that stakeholder group yeah I mean we're trying to be very open and inclusive and engage in in controversial discussions so we're not shying away from that and we launched recently also our own foundation our own a tie impact initiative that is also a non-profit so we're having a non-profit arm that is very much focused on destigmatizing mental health and we are I guess we're in a very stigmatized mental health indication area so it's not not easy for someone to talk about the mental health issues and at the same time we're tackling this problem with a highly stigmatized compound group so I think there is a lot of work to be done on the very upper awareness level and that's what we're doing with a non-profit in addition to educating or help education and help research basic research so on the education part and also engage with the ecosystem with large that also includes indigenous people who for centuries kept this science or this medication alive and here we're very interested to learn and how we can best integrate their experiences they take their techniques into the Western medical system and do you have a lot of founders tech people here what's kind of next for this sector like what's the next big innovation like what are you most excited about like maybe we don't need like more massive companies trying to do phase three clinical trials on psilocybin there are people doing that but like what do people need to be doing like what's the if we think this is going to be like a huge trend over the next 20 years and it's going to transform the mental health of 100 million people yeah more you know what should people in this room be thinking about be working on so we're R&D focused so we're a research company we're I guess keeping up we're keeping the opportunity to also get involved in commercialization but currently we don't assume that we will run clinics a lot of those therapies will need an infrastructure because they are in patient treatment so you need basically a therapist that guides you through the psychedelic experience and that requires clinics and offices and psychiatry a new paradigm in psychiatry that needs to be established in in Europe in the USA and beyond and I think these kind of exiliarly additional services next to the research that we're doing our key to scale to reach a scale to reach the 1 billion 1 billion people globally there are currently suffering so there's a lot to be done around just researching those molecules to yeah to get them out as soon as they are approved fantastic well that's the end of our that's the end of our time it feels incredibly incredibly short but I mean I mean for me I was just stunned by like the scale like I guess the scale of the market I mean I've seen actually previous stuff you guys have done talk about like a total addressable market of more or less everyone because everyone needs you know needs better mental health like a billion people this is like an incredible mission-driven company and I was really amazed as well by just the personal story but this comes from you know yourself and your friend that really brings it to life and I hope you all felt the same and enjoyed it too could we give a round of applause to Florian please