Big Pharma has a dirty little secret.
|
The industry made more than $60 billion last year dispensing mental health meds like Prozac to those beset with clinical depression, anxiety and other mental health issues.
Eli Lilly introduced Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), back in 1988. The drug was so successful that the company’s Indiana headquarters has been called “The House that Prozac Built.”
|
The problem is that Prozac and the SSRIs, while somewhat effective, come with big downsides in terms of side effects.
|
More importantly, since Prozac hit the market more than 30 years ago, there hasn’t been a significant pharmaceutical breakthrough to address depression.
But thanks to a recent resurgence in the study of psychedelic drugs’ impact on ailments like depression, we are sitting at the cusp of a revolution in mental health treatment.
And with a drug formulation approaching phase 2 trials — along with a handful of other psychedelic therapeutics in its pipeline — upstart company Cybin (NYSE-A: CYBN; NEO: CYBN) is poised to take a big slice out of Big Pharma’s profits.
|
Is This The End Of Clinical Depression?
|
Renewed interest in using psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, MDMA (ecstasy), ketamine and even LSD to treat depression has been led by major research institutions.
Over the past several years, prestigious medical universities and centers like Johns Hopkins and the Yale School of Medicine have been studying the effect of administering small, controlled doses of these drugs to people suffering from clinical depression, severe anxiety, PTSD and alcoholism and addiction.
|
| |
| Cybin’s Chief Scientific Officer Alex Nivorozhkin has led the development of several new chemical entities based on psychedelic drugs. |
The early results have been remarkable, with studies showing this class of drugs providing fast, dramatic and long-lasting relief to chronic mental health problems, with virtually no risk of addiction and minimal side-effects.
Alex Nivorozhkin, Cybin’s chief scientific officer, has taken this ball and run with it. In the past few years, he has been the lead inventor of several new chemical entities in the psychedelic therapeutics space.
Save
Not A Subscriber Yet?
Get Golden Opportunities For Free
Subscribe to our Golden Opportunities e-letter to receive timely market
updates from the Gold Newsletter research team, plus video
presentations by expert speakers from the New Orleans Conference
— and the Investor’s Guide to Gold and Silver — all at no cost!
CLICK HERE to start your subscription.
|
Disrupting A $60 Billion Big Pharma Segment
|
Indeed, the overall results of psychedelic med studies have been so promising that big institutional investors have begun pouring money into psychedelic stocks like Cybin.
That willingness for the big money to invest in this sector stands in sharp contrast to its reluctance to invest in cannabis stocks.
Even though both cannabis and psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA are considered Schedule 1 drugs in the U.S., there is currently no serious effort to make psychedelics legal for recreational use.
|
| |
| The potential of psychedelic drugs to provide breakthrough mental health treatments has convinced institutional investors and billionaires like Paypal Co-Founder Peter Thiel to make big bets on the sector. |
The current distribution model for psychedelics under investigation would see them distributed by prescription only under a doctor’s supervision.
|
This more clinical approach has convinced the likes of Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary and Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel to make big investments in these stocks.
|
That trend has played out for Cybin, which has already raised C$120 million from a variety of institutional investors.
|
A Three-Pillar Development Strategy
|
With a promising, psilocybin-based treatment for clinical depression already approaching phase 2 trials, Cybin’s development approach has three pillars.
|
Pillar #1: Developing a novel drug discovery platform. This pillar is focused on increasing the effect of psychedelics without decreasing their therapeutic value.
Pillar #2: Creating proprietary drug delivery formulation approaches like inhalation, sublingual, ODT and extended-release formulations.
Pillar #3: Developing a novel treatment regimen to help clinicians improve outcomes. This includes a software-based platform to assist therapy integration and state-of-the-art neuroimaging technology.
|
Cybin currently has 13 patent filings and a discovery pipeline of nearly 50 molecules.
|
Get In On The Ground Floor
|
It’s a development strategy that has Cybin poised to loosen Big Pharma’s stranglehold on pharmaceutical mental health treatments.
|
Cybin’s lead, psilocybin-based product has already proven so effective in addressing clinical depression that it’s about to enter phase 2 clinical trials.
|
Major research institutions like Johns Hopkins and Yale are throwing their weight behind the potential for controlled doses of psychedelics to revolutionize mental health.
|
| |
| The therapeutic potential of psychedelics to treat depression, anxiety and addiction is backed by research conducted by prestigious institutions like Johns Hopkins and the Yale School of Medicine. |
In a world where more than 700 million people have some form of mental illness, addiction or eating disorder, the current $60 billion addressable market for SSRIs alone likely only scratches the surface of the potential for psychedelic therapeutics.
|
Canaccord Genuity is forecasting that psychedelics could soon become a $100 billion sector. This is why institutional investors are making big bets on psychedelics right now — because they represent the future for treatment of mental illness.
|
And with a promising drug that promises to succeed where Big Pharma has failed in treating clinical depression, current Cybin (NYSE-A: CYBN; NEO: CYBN) trading levels offer a near ground-floor entry point on what could be one of the sector’s most profitable names.
|
|
.png)
