MindMed Inc.

Mind Medicine (MindMed) Inc., doing business as MindMed, is a New York-based biotechnology company that is currently developing clinical and therapeutic applications for psychedelic and, more broadly, psychoplastogenic drugs.

History
MindMed was founded in May 2019 by Jamon Rahn, a Y-Combinator alumnus who worked at Uber, and Stephen Hurst, a 35-year veteran of the pharmaceutical industry. Rahn, who was interested in the Silicon Valley trend of psychedelic microdosing to improve focus after struggling with his own mental health and addiction issues, spent two years researching the therapeutic potential of psychedelics prior to meeting Hurst.

MindMed initially focused on developing treatments for opioid withdrawal and opioid use disorder with 18-MC, a non-hallucinogenic molecule based on the psychoactive alkaloid ibogaine. In June 2019, it acquired the 18-MC drug development program, previously funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and in September began to prepare 18-MC for a Phase I FDA clinical trial to enable further clinical trials targeting opioid withdrawal and opioid use disorder. Psychopharmacologist Stanley Glick, who first synthesized 18-MC with chemist Martin E. Kuehne, was later named to MindMed's board of directors and appointed chair of its scientific advisory board.

MindMed was the first psychedelic pharmaceutical company to go public, listing on the Canadian NEO Exchange in March of 2020 through a reverse takeover with the Canadian gold mining company Broadway Gold Mining. It began trading on the Nasdaq as MNMD in April 2021 after being approved for an uplisting from the OTC Markets.

In a press release on June 9th, 2021 MindMed announced that Jamon Rahn was stepping down both as the CEO and as a director on the board, to be replaced by then CDO Robert Barrow. On January 7th, 2022, Co-Founder Stephen Hurst resigned from his position on the company's board of directors.

Partnerships with universities
In March 2020, MindMed announced that it had partnered with NYU Langone to launch a clinical training program to train psychiatrists in psychedelic therapies and research to advance and deploy psychedelic medicines. The company committed $5 million to establish the center, which will also explore 18-MC and the use of drugs, including psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder.

In April 2020, the company entered into a long-term partnership with University Hospital Basel's Liechti Lab, gaining rights to more than ten years of the lab's data related to LSD, MDMA, and other psychedelic substances. The development of a novel compound designed to shorten the duration or stop an LSD experience that would allow LSD to be more widely used in a therapeutic environment was subsequently announced. Later that year a clinical trial studying the effects of DMT, the primary psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca, and clinical trials combining MDMA and LSD were announced. A study to better understand and compare the altered states of consciousness induced by psilocybin and LSD began in August 2020, and in October a Phase 1 study at the Liechti Lab on the acute dose dependent effects of LSD was completed. The results of the study were published by the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. In September 2021, further results were presented by Dr. Matthias Liechti, head of the Liechti Lab, at the INSIGHT Conference in Berlin. The results included the first clinical evidence on the comparative effects of LSD and psilocybin, stating 100mcg of LSD produced the same acute perceptual effects as a dose of 20 mg of psilocybin in healthy volunteers. Additionally, psilocybin taken after administering antidepressants for two weeks prior, was deemed safe, as well as reduced anxiety and blood pressure without hindering the psychedelic experience.

In December 2020, MindMed entered into an investigator-sponsored study agreement with Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The university provided facilities and personnel for a Phase 1 study to evaluate the effects of two low doses of LSD on mood, sleep and neuroplasticity.

Ongoing clinical trials

 * Project Lucy: Therapist-led experiential therapy incorporating microdoses of LSD to lessen anxiety.
 * Project Layla: A study concluding that a Phase 1 clinical trial of single and multiple ascending doses of 18-MC in healthy subjects was safe at the doses tested. It was subsequently announced that pending review of the data from the first round of tests, MindMed would initiate a Phase 2a proof of concept study with escalatad dosages of 18-MC.