BHE Psychedelics Podcast, Episode 003 – James Lanthier, Mindset Pharma CEO

Mindset Pharma CEO James Lanthier discusses his organization’s development of next-generation psychedelic drugs that could potentially offer the same therapeutic benefits as currently available psychedelics, but with a shorter duration. An executive with extensive experience in the technology realm, Lanthier also explains what motivated him to enter the field of psychedelics, shares details on a key new partnership for Mindset, and offers his thoughts on how the work Mindset is doing now could impact behavioral healthcare providers’ treatment offerings in the coming years.

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TRANSCRIPT

Tom Valentino: Hello, and welcome to “The BHE Psychedelics Podcast.” I’m BHE digital managing editor, Tom Valentino. Today, I’m joined by James Lanthier, CEO of Mindset Pharma. James, thanks for taking the time to join us. How are you?

James Lanthier: I’m great, Tom. Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

Valentino: Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your organization and the work that you do.

Lanthier: Sure. Mindset Pharma is about a 3‑year‑old biotechnology company. We’re based in Toronto, Canada. We’ve been exclusively focused, since our beginning, on discovering and developing what we described as next‑generation psychedelic medications.

Essentially, what we’re doing is applying the tools of biotechnology to these powerful first‑generation drugs like psilocybin and DMT to try to create medications that are going to be more optimized for use across big patient groups. We’re trying to improve things like their duration and their effect and their safety. We’re trying to try to make more predictable medications.

Valentino: That was actually something I wanted to ask you about. When you talk about next‑generation psychedelics, can you tell us a little bit more about how you improve on them? What’s out there, now? How do you build a better mousetrap, so to speak? What things are you specifically looking to improve on?

Lanthier: Sure. A good analogy to help explain what it is that we’re trying to do is if you look to the work that the German chemist did in the 19th century, to go from the bark of the willow tree, which was known for thousands of years to be a very powerful painkiller. For a long time, people would make the tea out of it.

Unfortunately, it had some nasty side effects. You’d be sick to your stomach. It might kill your pain, but it would give you some [laughs] other problems. In the 19th century, the German chemists had to do a lot of work, go through a lot of intermediate steps to eventually get to the drug that we know, as aspirin, which was gold standard for pain medication for over a century.

That’s the work that we’re trying to do here. Psilocybin is the psychoactive component that people may be familiar with. It comes from what people have called magic mushrooms. We’ve viewed psilocybin with a lot of respect. It’s an amazing compound.

In our view, it had certain limitations. We were of the view, or I should say, our scientific founding team was of the view that it had some limitations in terms of its predictability. Certainly, it had some limitations in terms of its duration. A psilocybin trip lasts for 6 to 8 hours.

If you think about that in the context of psychedelic‑assisted psychotherapy, where you’re doing a dose of psilocybin and being accompanied by therapists, that’s a long time to have to spend in clinic, ties up a lot of therapist resources to deal with you.

If there was a way to get to a shorter duration drug that still delivered the same therapeutic benefit, that could be useful for patients and valuable.

Then lastly, we also felt, based on what was in the literature, there were some safety concerns with psilocybin that maybe weren’t so well understood.

Valentino: I wanted to back up a little bit as we started with some background. I was doing my homework on you. I saw that prior to coming to Mindset, you had cofounded a firm that developed AI applications for human infertility. You also have quite a bit of experience in the technology sector.

I’m curious, what made you as an executive, what inspired you to make this leap into the world of psychedelics? It’s an interesting transition that caught my eye.

Lanthier: I’d always been interested in psychedelic drugs and enjoyed reading about the research into them, and the evidence that was building around their potential efficacy.

I’ve also had some friends over the years who’ve had, frankly, some breakthrough experiences using psychedelic drugs in a ceremonial context. I’ve watched them enjoy some profound changes in their day‑to‑day lives and the shedding of some negative habits.

I was pretty positively predisposed and interested in this class of compounds when I was approached by some of the original founders of mindset, who were looking to try to advance the business, so I was pretty interested.

What sold me on getting involved in mindset was the caliber of the founding scientific team. Once I got to understand the strategy that they devised for approaching the psychedelic, this early evolving medical psychedelic market, I thought it was incredibly farsighted.

I thought that their view that psychedelic medication would be an enormous opportunity, but would look very different than how a lot of early investors were thinking about the space. It was not going to be anything like the cannabis space.

It was going to be a new sector of biopharma and what’s important in the medical world and in the early stage, strong intellectual property rights and differentiation. It was that strategy, the fact that this scientific team, they have the right skills to execute on that. I was excited to get involved and that’s why I joined.

Valentino: It’s a fascinating area. There’s so much happening in this space right now. One development with your organization, you recently announced the partnership with the McQuade Center. Can you tell us a little bit about what that alliance is going to entail, and what work you’re going to be doing there?

Lanthier: Absolutely. We were excited to announce this partnership a few weeks ago. McQuade Center for Strategic Research and Development is the essentially early‑stage development arm of the Otsuka pharmaceutical business, which is part of the larger Otsuka family of companies.

Then, that name might not be so familiar to North Americans. Actually, Otsuka is a global top 10 neuroscience company. They have large and successful drug franchises in schizophrenia and a real focus on mental health. We started talking to Otsuka about a year ago. They’re probably the Big Pharma out of all Big Pharma companies, that’s the most involved in the psychedelic space.

They’ve done a few things in it before. They were interested in getting involved in new drugs. The partnership that we formed with Otsuka is the first partnership of any psychedelic biotech that’s focused on new drugs with a Big Pharma. We’re collaborating with them on 2 of our 4 new drug families, 2 of our shorter‑acting families.

The substance of the partnership is that Otsuka is going to lend their expertise and will fund the development of our 2 of these 4 families to complete our preclinical work and to take them through to the end of that phase I clinical trials. That’s a significant amount of funding.

All the funding could range upwards of $40 million when all is said and done. That funding is all non‑dilutive. It’s a great source of capital for Mindset, but more importantly, a top strategic partner that has an incredible amount of expertise in getting mental health drugs, through qualifying them, working with regulators to make sure that they’re safe and effective, and getting them to market.

What it does, frankly, is sets us up for another opportunity to do a more comprehensive deal or partnership with Otsuka at the end of phase I. In addition to all that funding, they’ve also made a very significant upfront payment for Mindset’s own benefit of $5 million.

From an investor standpoint, it’s great. It de‑risks our balance sheet, and because we get to leverage Otsuka’s expertise, allows our scientific team to continue to focus on what they’re good at, which is early‑stage‑drug discovery, and now partner with a group that has world‑class capabilities of getting drugs to market. We couldn’t be more excited about it.

Valentino: Where do you see all of this going in terms of the use of psychedelics to treat mental health conditions? Is your organization works to develop some of this next‑generation psychedelic? What other opportunities are you seeing to expand their applications with regards to treating mental health?

Lanthier: We’re at the early stages of the development of this industry and market, because these drugs for a long time were difficult to get access to even to study because they were scheduled in the early 1970s.

The whole industry has been able to build and Mindset is focused on building on the fact that, though, there would be the original use of these drugs, at least in North America in the middle of the 20th century, was therapeutic. LSD was used to treat alcoholism. Psilocybin was used for psychotherapy in the 1960s.

The bottom line is, we know that these drugs have a very good hunch that these drugs work, not only for things like treatment of resistant depression and post‑traumatic stress, but we’re seeing evidence to suggest that they work for a wide range of different indications.

For Mindset, our focus is, we’re not clinicians, our scientists are world‑class at early‑stage discovery, creating new IP, and finally figuring out where there’s some differentiation between what we’ve created and what has previously existed.

We’re going to let the clinician‑researchers, the psychiatrists, running these different early‑stage studies, we’re going to let them figure out what the right indications are that psychedelic drugs could potentially work for. Then, what the right qualities or the essential qualities, ideal qualities, should be in those psychedelic drugs to treat those different indications.

What’s the right nature of the trip? How long should the trip be? What are some of the different characteristics that are going to be important? Our goal is to try to design as many different drugs as possible, that are optimized to meet those criteria and that are going to be as safe and as predictable as possible for the widest possible patient groups.

That’s why, again, we’re so excited about this partnership because we have a roadmap that we’re excited to execute on. There are hundreds of other psychedelic drugs out there that are less well understood than the big five or six that people talk about all the time.

We think that all of those could be candidates to apply a lot of what we’ve learned. We’ve learned an enormous amount about psychedelic drugs, structure, activity, relationships, and apply that to some of these lesser well‑known drugs. It may well be that there are other blockbuster psychedelic medications out there that haven’t been discovered yet.

We want to do the upfront discovery work. Then, work with both the clinicians and researchers to figure out what indications those could be used for.

What’s exciting is it does look at least on a preliminary basis that psychedelic drugs could work for a lot of other indications in the mental health neuropsychiatric world, mood disorders, well beyond the treatment of resistant depression and post‑traumatic stress.

Valentino: Executives at behavioral health treatment organizations, these provider organizations, make up a large contingent of our audience. The drugs that you’re developing, the work that you’re putting in now, could have some very significant implications for the work they do in the coming years. This is exciting stuff.

Lanthier: It is. It’s early days, but it’s a very different model of treating mental health disorders.

You’re talking about rather than managing a chronic condition with constant daily medication in the case at least of the psilocybin clinical trials and the MDMA clinical trials, you’re talking about a couple of significant sessions that then give the patient, based on the data, seemingly pretty significant relief from their symptoms for a long period of time.

These people who suffer from these vindications, particularly treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, these populations are poly-pharmacology populations. People have a lot of other things wrong with them. There’s real potential for good knock‑on benefits to these groups if you’re able to alleviate their mental suffering. It has a lot of positive implication for exactly that.

Valentino: Very interesting stuff. James Lanthier, thank you so much for taking the time, and best of luck with your work with Mindset.

Lanthier: Thank you so much, Tom. It was great chatting with you. I appreciate you having me on.

Valentino: All right. That is James Lanthier, the CEO of Mindset Pharma. We thank him for taking the time to join us today. As a reminder, you could listen to past episodes of The BHE Psychedelics Podcast, as well as our flagship, “BHE Podcast” on our website, behavioral.net.

That’s going to do it for us for today. I’m BHE, digital managing editor, Tom Valentino. This has been the BHE Psychedelics Podcast.