Psilera Bioscience on their new startup and the future of psychedelics

‘We’re trying to change the world’.

Dr Chris Witowski and Dr Jackie Salm are the young co-founders of a new psychedelic research startup already making waves in the industry. Earlier this month they were granted space in the University of South Florida’s incubator programme where they can utilise the facilities and the licencing the university has to fast-track their research.

They’ve both taken big risks by leaving promising careers at AltMed, one of the countries biggest medical cannabis organisations, to co-found Psilera and pursue something they believe can make a big difference in mental health.

I caught up with them both in tropical attire over Zoom to discuss what it’s like moving into this dynamic and highly competitive space.

So how did you guys start working together? What made you jump ship and found your own psychedelic research organisation?

Chris: I’ve known Jackie since 2011. We were both graduate students at the University of South Florida. We worked in a natural products chemistry lab and we did a lot of brain research.

We did a lot of work in the Florida Keys, Antarctica, trying to find breeding organisms that would produce compounds that we could use beneficially to treat diseases.

We both graduated with our PhDs and I went into the cannabis industry and started working for AltMed, who is a multi-state operator now, in Florida. I moved out to Arizona and started their first facility there then I came back to Florida and actually recruited Jackie in about 2017 to come work with us. I think I helped AltMed open about five different labs in five different states.

Jackie: Yeah my background was pretty much the same for a few of those years, doing drug discovery from different marine organisms. We did a lot of fungal work and a lot of different microbes. I actually did some antibiotics research and I got into the pharma world for a little bit doing formulations.

Around that time, my dad was diagnosed with a rare form of dementia that sort of catalysed my interest in the neuroscience side of things and some of the neurological disorders. I also have a decent family history of different types of addiction and I’ve really seen the opioid crisis. I lived in Vancouver for a little while which was hit really hard by a lot of that. I think that helped drive me in the direction of the cannabis industry, which was when Chris recruited me there.

Last year Chris and I decided to start our own company because we started to see the psychedelics revolution happening again. It’s had a couple of waves and we decided that this one seemed like a pretty big wave and that it might actually stick this time.

Chris: We founded the company in July of last year and part of that first six months was just trying to figure out research-wise what we’re going to focus on.

We spent a good time amount of doing that as well as trying to build a team and get a landscape of the industry, which obviously, with our experience in cannabis, we know is going to be dynamic and changing and there’s going to be a lot of competition.

We’ve submitted paperwork to work with controlled substances like psilocybin, psilocin, DMT and to be able to obtain those compounds. From an academic standpoint, working with the University provides a lot of benefits. I worked there in 2015 with CBD, which at the time was still a schedule one drug, so the lab is already set up to work with schedule one compounds. Psilocybin was actually worked with on USF campus back in 2011.

We’ve submitted a number of provisional patents for a number of compounds. These are new chemical entities we believe will produce psilocin in the body as well as others we think can reduce the psychoactivity profile and produce new delivery formats so that we can go from an inpatient trial to more traditional outpatient pharmaceutical-type delivery options.

Tell me about your vision for what you’re going to be doing with this. What’s the kind of work that you’re actually going to be sort of upon?

Jackie: Our main focus right now is going to be on psilocybin, psilocin, and the scaffold, the general structure of that molecule. We’re trying to not only work with those exact compounds but also trying to modify them in ways that might be a little bit more suitable as an actual pharmaceutical.

A lot of times natural compounds, unfortunately, aren’t the most stable things for long term shelf life or actually, you know, being able to use them consistently. Some of our work will be trying to modify it in ways to help try to keep it more stable for the shelf.

Right now we are looking at the clinically untreatable depression model but our long term goals are targeting neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s, dementia, that sort of thing. Also addiction, especially alcohol abuse, and some of those other forms of addiction. All of those things are targeting the same area of the brain.

We’re targeting the whole serotonin system in the brain and we hope that some of the compounds we’re working on will have unique properties as well to even potentially reduce some of the more hallucinogenic aspects of psychedelics while still maintaining the bioactivity.

The big question around patenting and the pharmaceutical model is whether a patented chemical will be available to people who need it. The natural versions are available to people right now and are not difficult to access. Where do you stand on that debate?

Jackie: For me, coming at this from a cannabis perspective, I really only see one way that you’re going to get the best of both worlds and that is to have both worlds. I think that there absolutely needs to be both. Cannabis could have an over the counter option, a more ‘recreational option’, but also your pharmaceutical and medical option.

Right now if I have really extreme pain, I have to go to a doctor for a prescription but if I have a headache I can take an aspirin which I buy from a random drugstore. So I think having both of those options is what’s going to be important.

We have to find some way to have these two worlds coexist. I don’t know why it seems to be so difficult when right now that already happens. I think it’s really just a matter of government coming to terms with the idea of having something on a shelf that they’ve always been so against for decades.

Chris: From my perspective, you know, we founded Psilera on the basis of changing the world and you can’t do that with a very narrow vision, of just looking at it from a pharmaceutical perspective. We don’t have the rights or the moral compass to take that away from individuals if that’s what they want to do.

Jackie: We do have aspirations to work with the actual mushroom and fungal material as well but that is going to require a little bit more time. Our goal is to try and bridge those two things as much as possible.

So how easily will people be able to access the chemicals that you guys are going to be discovering?

Chris: Yeah, again for us, you know, we’re trying to change the world so we want to make it accessible. I believe the inpatient model of psychotherapy with psychedelics is quite restrictive. Looking at a clinical trial type model where you have to be supervised by two professionally trained individuals, you have to have two or three meetings before and after, that is going to be quite costly no matter how you break it down. You’re going to have to be there for hours upon hours and it’s going to be disruptive from a lifestyle perspective.

We are trying to make a very accessible, more outpatient, traditional-type pharmaceutical therapy. We’ve got some really good ideas on how to make or lessen the abuse potential of some of these delivery formats and make that more of a take-home type therapy for as many patients as we can potentially hope to provide for.

Jackie: It would be really nice to have something that was a daily or maybe a weekly option for people that they don’t have to sit in a room for six hours, especially with the US medical system. You along with the rest of the world know how ridiculous it is cost-wise, I’m sure. Sitting in a room with someone for that long is just not realistic for a large portion of the population. A large portion of the population who have depression, or anxiety, or PTSD are not that financially stable. It’s definitely at the top of our list.

I’m interested in hearing more about this take-home idea because there is debate around what causes the benefits they’ve seen psilocybin give to people with depression. Is it a chemical change? Or is it the psychedelic experience itself?

Chris: Looking at a cognitive disorder like dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, where they’re showing decreased serotonin levels, if we were able to deliver a sustainable serotonin dose over longer periods of time that may be beneficial for those people where I don’t think a psychedelic breakthrough dose is really going to be helpful in the long term for Alzheimer’s type patients.

Part of the psychotherapy model is having a psychedelic experience that you can open up and identify problems and communicate them to treat them but looking at other disorders, I do think that chemical changes might just be as beneficial as psychotherapy.

Jackie: Certain forms of depression are resistant to any of the current medications and therapies. If you’re at that level you may need that breakthrough experience to get deep enough into your own mind to work through some of the trauma or whatever else it is that you need to get through.

Whereas there are a lot of other things that some of these psychedelics can benefit that may not need that level. I think what we have to figure out is, for the things that don’t, ways to make it more accessible so that their only option isn’t sitting in a room for six hours.

Chris: Patients with psychosis or schizophrenia have been omitted from clinical trials because they think high doses can actually exacerbate some of those symptoms. So trying to target a larger population that could potentially benefit from these therapies really is our goal.

Jackie: Heart conditions as well, right?

Chris: Yeah. There’s a lot of co-morbidities. If you have one mental health illness there’s a greater chance you’ll have more. If you’re on antidepressants, you generally have heart problems and some other issues that a lot of clinical trials are omitting.

Yeah, psychedelics are a very inexact method. I want to ask about mainstream acceptance and the mainstream move toward psychedelics because for a long time what you’re doing was very fringe and not considered legitimate science. How do you see all of this playing out?

Jackie: I have no idea how it’s gonna play out but from a hopeful standpoint I would really like to start seeing people recognise that a lot of these things we call psychedelics, they’re very similar to plenty of things already on the market. Pharmaceutical companies have already been producing a lot of different sort of psychoactive compounds in their own right.

Outside of that, we don’t really have a good definition of what a psychedelic is or what hallucinogenics really are. I think we can start to really treat some of these things as their own thing.

I think everyone has to stop being scared of the unknown to come to that level of acceptance. I think that it’ll happen. I think that for certain psychedelics, it’ll be a longer time for them to come into acceptance than some of the others, especially some of the more intense ones.

Chris: That’s such a hard question. I’ll read the crystal ball here. Having gone through cannabis and seeing how that unfolded pretty quickly, I think that opened a lot of people’s minds up to psychedelics. I think that’s why you’ve seen the public acceptance really take hold as quickly as it has.

But these are a whole different class of compounds to cannabinoids in psychoactivity. There are certain people whose mental illness can actually be exacerbated by the use of psychedelics. They’re powerful chemicals and I think it will take some time.

We’ll see if what happens with cannabis might transition to psychedelics but I think realistically we should proceed with caution. There is a lot of risk there and all it takes is one bad outcome and you can really put a black eye on the psychedelics industry.

For us, we are looking more at the biotech/pharmaceutical model because it’s less risk-averse. We’re working through a defined regulatory pathway to get our compounds and our drugs approved. Beyond that, it’s hard to speculate.

Jackie: We just hope the route that we’re going will divert some of those situations from happening. If you go for the full recreational or decriminalisation pathway without a whole lot of research or thought put into it, you’re gonna have a lot of people who don’t have any idea what they’re doing and you’re gonna have a lot of people get hurt.

I think that would be a huge detriment to the entire industry because they have so much potential that it would really suck to have something like that happen and have the government crackdown again.

I know there’s a lot of stigma against companies trying to patent things, trying to keep intellectual property. I think the way we justified it was that it keeps us in control so someone else who might not know what they’re doing can’t come along and potentially ruin it.

We saw it a lot in cannabis so we’ve kind of learned to trust what we believe and what we know and what we research and if we can at least keep a hold on it for a little bit to make sure that it’s done properly, then maybe we’ll save some of that.