Possible Ventures invests in Psylo, Australia's first psychedelic biotech company

"When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT."
— How to change your mind, Michael Pollan

The most promising child of the psychedelic revolution is psilocybin. More specifically, psychedelic-assisted therapy using psilocybin, the active molecule in magic mushrooms, is now widely recognised as a potentially game-changing treatment for severe mental illness.

We're experiencing a psychedelic renaissance with research programs active in prestigious universities across the globe - Oxford, Cambridge, Kings College London, UCLA, Harvard, New York University, Yale and the universities of Zurich and Basel.

Centres of excellence are popping up too. In April, London’s prestigious Imperial College opened the Imperial Centre for Psychedelic Research. Then in September, leading United States medical complex Johns Hopkins followed suit by opening The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research.

Australia is no exception, with the Psychae Institute recently opening in Melbourne, fresh with $40m in funding from a US biotech company. Not-for-profit group Mind Medicine Australia has also contributed to education and lobbying of the government's position on psychedelic medicine.

The exploration of novel psychedelic-inspired treatments has only just begun, and not a moment too soon. Mental illness is the health crisis of our time. 46 percent of Australians will experience mental illness in their lifetime - a statistic that is repeated across most developed countries.

Unsurprisingly, Covid-19 has driven a global surge in prescriptions of antidepressants (SSRIs and SNRIs). Yet mental illness continues to spike, despite the ubiquity of antidepressants. Unfortunately, studies show that they improve symptoms for only 20 percent of people.

Traditional treatments are wholly ineffective.

A recent Johns Hopkins' psilocybin study suggests that psychedelics profoundly impact the treatment of mental illness. Specifically, Psilocybin has a proven efficacy 4 times that of SSRI antidepressants.

Psylo is building a proprietary platform for developing psychedelic medicines to redefine how we treat mental illness.

The initial focus is to develop a shorter-acting version of psilocybin, which is normally administered for 6-8 hours. According to co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer, Samuel Banister, "a medicine that has a similar clinical profile to psilocybin, but which reduces a treatment session to 1-3 hours, could drastically expand the therapeutic application."

Mental disorders account for one of the largest and fastest growing categories of the burden of disease worldwide. Mental ill-health has devastating effect on individuals, families and communities, and weighs heavily on societies and economies - the economic burden of mental ill-health can rise to up to 4% of GDP, and those with mental illness have poorer educational and work outcomes than those in good mental health.

As the use of psychedelics to treat mental ill-health becomes increasingly destigmatised, government funding for trials and demand for medical-grade psilocybin will continue to grow.

The Psylo team is uniquely positioned to transform mental health treatment with the application of psychedelics. Collectively, they bring years of experience researching cannabinoids and building deep biotech companies. And, like all great company-builders, the founding team has assembled a supporting tribe of industry-leading biotech investors and psychedelic experts.

The great challenge will be to replace antidepressants altogether. By iterating on naturally occurring drugs, Psylo intends to produce a patent library of novel molecules to meet the exploding global demand for next-generation therapeutics.

The world desperately needs a new generation of mental health medicine, so we’re proud to be backing Josh Ismin, Sam Banister and the entire Psylo team on their psychedelic mission.

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