How to (legally) make psychedelic medicine drugs: CEO of Psygen, Danny Motyka

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Greg Kubin: [00:00:00] Welcome to Business Trip. A podcast about psychedelic entrepreneurship. Psychedelic medicine is transforming mental, physical, and spiritual health. And entrepreneurship will be key to expanding access. Business Trip explores the business models and origin stories of the most interesting companies in psychedelics.

[00:00:27] I'm your host, Greg Kubin. We're chatting today with Danny Motyka, the CEO of Psygen, a Canadian manufacturer of psychedelics, like MDMA, LSD, DMT, and synthetic psilocybin. If a company is producing those kinds of compounds, we had to know what's happening behind the scenes. Psygen makes high quality pharmaceutical grade psychedelic medicines for clinical research and therapeutic applications.

[00:00:54] What's cool about a company like Psygen is that all the manufacturing they do would historically be underground, illegal and lacking quality controls. Psygen's team is a crew of scientists and chemists who have a license to be one of the first manufacturing facilities dedicated to the synthesis of psychedelic drugs.

[00:01:11] For anyone who's interested in understanding more about what it takes to produce the entheogens and medicines we often speak of on the podcast, this episode is going to be a treat. And now our conversation with Danny Matyko from Psygen.

[00:01:33] Let's start with your background, Danny, how did you get to a place where you started Psygen and are becoming a manufacturer of psychedelic

[00:01:45] medicine? 

[00:01:46] Danny Motyka: [00:01:46] Yeah, so that story starts a long time ago. When I was a teenager, I was suffering from pretty severe depression and anxiety as my father was diagnosed with brain cancer.

[00:01:57] And just as a 13 year old, struggling to understand what that meant and the existential crisis of death as a teenager. And already at that point, there'd been several people pass away in my life that, um, you know, I was a deep thinker and I was quite distressed and it led me to kind of take an attempt at my own life, which failed obviously.

[00:02:16] And after the failure, I felt happy to still be alive, but there was still just this void that kind of felt was missing. And so as a teenager growing up in the edge of the internet, I was doing a lot of research and I've had a tend towards spirituality and ended up coming across some early research with psilocybin mushrooms and how they could be helpful for depression.

[00:02:35] And so I actually asked an older cousin of mine, if he would be able to procure some mushrooms for me. And after taking three and a half grams of those mushrooms for the first time, I felt the passion for life was breezed back into my soul. I find it hard to really put into words that first experience, but there's just such a sense of aww and this

[00:02:55] profound experience of why life is worth living. That I felt like, you know, I needed to help or I needed to join the movement to help make these drugs accessible to other people that were struggling. So then going through high school, I was looking for how I could play a role in this, in this movement and chemistry came very natural to me.

[00:03:16] And so I decided to pursue synthetic organic chemistry in university with the intention of becoming a psychedelic manufacturer. When I graduated, I was looking to do Master's or PhD work in analytical chemistry to try and improve harm reduction testing methods. And so I wanted to try and use electrochemistry to make a device that could give you a kind of a fingerprint of chemicals, super fast, super cheap, and just help to improve harm reduction at festivals.

[00:03:40] But there were no professors that were interested in associating their research group with, with psychedelics or psychedelic medicine. So I ended up joining the cannabis industry to learn the controlled drugs and substances regulations and try and figure out how to mirror, what was happening in cannabis to psychedelics.

[00:03:54] So in 2018, I was becoming a little bit disenchanted with the way that the Canadian cannabis industry was evolving. I felt that quality was not being matched relative to the dispensary model. That was in, in my mind, there's not a clear way that the regulations should have been developed. And I just felt like I needed to start revisiting my, the purpose that I was ultimately called to, which was psychedelic medicine.

[00:04:16] So in 2019, I ended up leaving the cannabis producer that I was working for and was putting together a business plan when I reached out to Rick Doblin from MAPS asking him, if he would be willing to help me put together this business plan to become a manufacturer. And he introduced me to Peter Van der Hayden, who is our co-founder and CSO, who was working on an identical project.

[00:04:38] And when Peter and I met our values were both perfectly aligned. We both have the same vision. Peter was in his mid-to-late sixties and he felt like he was looking for a CEO, a younger CEO who'd be able to take the company and would match his vision and would be able to kind of lead it into the future.

[00:04:56] Greg Kubin: [00:04:56] Dr. Peter Van der Hayden is Psygen's Chief Scientific Officer, and he knows a thing or two about making psychedelics. Back in Canada in the nineties, he ran an underground drug lab with the famous acid chemist, Nick Sand creator of orange sunshine -  a legendary variety of LSD in the sixties. Between Sand and Van der Hayden,

[00:05:16] it said that they've made well over 100 million doses of LSD. 

[00:05:20] Danny Motyka: [00:05:20] So, Peter and I decided to join together and that's how Psyge came to be. 

[00:05:25] Greg Kubin: [00:05:25] What would you say is your shared vision and what are your shared values? 

[00:05:29] Danny Motyka: [00:05:29] We're at a psychedelic conference and researchers were all asking or they were all saying the same thing.

[00:05:34] We need improved access to GMP psychedelic drug products. It was difficult to obtain uh psilocybin from them for their clinical research. And so both Peter and I independently said, Okay, this is the mission: we need to improve access to GMP psychedelic drug products. So, you know, psilocybin was definitely the drug that was... 

[00:05:52] Greg Kubin: [00:05:52] As a reminder from episode three

[00:05:53] gMP stands for good manufacturing practices. They're quality control standards set by the FDA. At the end of the day, GMP is there to protect the patients who will be taking these medicines. More about this in a minute. 

[00:06:07] Danny Motyka: [00:06:07] And as for the shared values, generosity is definitely one of them transparency, open science, quality.

[00:06:14] It was really just about. How can we improve access to these medicines and how can we do it in a way that is beneficial for shareholders, but that ultimately is building the most value possible for stakeholders in this community instead of just trying to maximize profits. 

[00:06:29] Greg Kubin: [00:06:29] Yeah. Let's, let's get into the manufacturing side of your business. What compounds does Psygen plan to produce?

[00:06:37] Danny Motyka: [00:06:37] So currently Psygenn is focused on producing psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and DMT, but we have plans to get into ibogaine into 5-MeO-DMT into all kinds of four substituted tryptamines. We're exploring some novel ergolines and some novel tryptamines potentially. So we have a lot that is in store. 

[00:06:57] Greg Kubin: [00:06:57] What is the cost of manufacturing, an individual dose of, I don't know, MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, whatever other medicines that you are developing? Would love to get into the costs, as well as what it takes to actually make them.

[00:07:13] Danny Motyka: [00:07:13] Yeah, that's a great question and something that I think we're going to be refining over the years to come, as we really understand all of the costs to install a GMP compliant manufacturing laboratory, because they're just kind of the, you know, raw chemical input costs and labor costs, which I would suggest probably amount to somewhere between six and $700 a gram for psilocybin in small batches.

[00:07:36] There's also going to be economies of scale, but in some of the research batches, that's probably what you'd be averaging. But when you then have to consider the additional costs of GMP, of good manufacturing practices, you have so much additional overhead that is added in terms of compliance, testing, and quality release testing.

[00:07:56] In terms of your stability programs, in terms of validating all of your equipment. So the general costs for GMP is so high that a lot of companies right now, according to various reports, the market rate for psilocybin is between five and $10,000 a gram. And so our sense is that the profit margins, if there's, if there's not

[00:08:16] ridiculously high profit margins that that cost to produce your gram of psilocybin is probably going to be somewhere in the $2,500 to $3,000, a gram range. 

[00:08:25] Greg Kubin: [00:08:25] And those GMP standards that you mentioned, could you dig into each of those, you know, some examples of what kind of manufacturing practices are required and I guess the costs that are then associated with them?

[00:08:39] Danny Motyka: [00:08:39] Yeah, absolutely. In order to bring a drug product to market, you have to go through rigorous clinical trials, testing, safety, and efficacy, and then you have to move your way up through larger and larger population. So the cost to bring a drug to market has increased pretty substantially. And in order to manufacture a drug

[00:08:56] for use in a market, you also need to make sure that it's going to be safe and repeatable, which basically means installing controls in every step of your manufacturing process so that you always have a safe product at the end. So for example, you have supplier and vendor qualifications, where if you're buying a raw material that goes into

[00:09:15] producing a finished good you need to understand what everyone in your supply chain is doing and that all of those people in your supply chain are not going to be changing their production practices for you. Because if you have done a risk assessment based on a chemical input, that changes without your knowledge, you could be introducing an impurity into your final product that you're not actually testing for.

[00:09:36] And so, in your final release testing, you might have kind of an unknown impurity that you need to do a root cause analysis on, and you can't find it. It's tedious to say the least and the paper trail is enormous, but having all of those controls in place have really made drugs much safer and much more repeatable. 

[00:09:54] Greg Kubin: [00:09:54] Near the end of the production process.

[00:09:56] When it's time for testing are people actually trying the drugs before they go to market, or how are you actually ensuring that they're effective and safe? 

[00:10:05] Danny Motyka: [00:10:05] Yeah, that's, that's a great question. So there's, I can unpack it into two ways. When we're talking about drug products, there's two things there.

[00:10:12] There's the drug substance, which is your active ingredient. So let's just use Compass' new product, the COMP360. Their active substance would be your psilocybin in the form of polymorphe. So that would be the drug substance, but the drug product is your COMP360, which includes their psilocybin in the form of polymorphe and

[00:10:30] numerous excipients that are maybe undisclosed that kind of combining, and it includes the capsule, it includes anything else that they formulate it with. And so Psygen currently is a manufacturer just of the drug substance. When we do our release testing, we basically have to make sure that it conforms to certain specifications, that we identify it with several tests that

[00:10:51] can prove without a doubt that the substance that you intended to produce is the substance you intended to produce. And then in your manufacturing process, if there are any risks of heavy metal impurities or, you know, solvents in the manufacturing process, you also have to demonstrate that none of those impurities still exist in your product.

[00:11:08] So then once you have that drug substance, produced and turned into a drug product, that's when you have animal testing. And so this is something that Psygen is, is all too aware of right now is just the unfortunate reality of animal testing and psychedelics. And something that we've been trying to work towards is having a decentralized approach where companies that are doing clinical research can all kind of work together to have one

[00:11:34] set of animal toxicity data so that we don't need to duplicate or sacrifice animals unneeded. It is unfortunately a reality that all drug products that are approved by the FDA or by Health Canada need some form of preclinical data, which is generated by animal testing. 

[00:11:49] Greg Kubin: [00:11:49] So in terms of the synthesis itself, can you explain to me as somebody who is not a chemist nor has really made any attempt at trying to make, uh, produce, manufacture drugs before, um, a high level, like, is there a similarity in synthesis across different psychedelics?

[00:12:08] And can you explain what the synthesis process actually looks like?

[00:12:12]Danny Motyka: [00:12:12] Yeah. So, like you say, it depends on the psychedelic that you're looking at, but because psychedelics generally fall into tryptamines or phenethylamines or ergolines, which is their parent chemical structure, a lot of the synthetic methods look similar.

[00:12:28] And I think that the easiest way to describe it is really just considering chemists says builders, but they're building molecules in instead of houses. And so houses are made of wood and metal and molecules are made of carbon atoms and oxygen atoms and nitrogen atoms. The way that we assemble these is through chemical reactions.

[00:12:50] So really the synthesis begins with a simple precursor. So you might start with like a four substituted indole, and you would dissolve that in some kind of a solvent, put in various reactants. And really what you're doing is you're encouraging the electrons from one of those chemical moieties to rearrange themselves and recombine.

[00:13:08] And in novel ways, you form an intermediate that's along the path. So typically our products are between kind of two and six synthetic steps. And then at the very end, then you have your kind of recrystallization or your purification step, where you strip out all of the other impurities and you crystallize out the most pure form of the psychedelic that you're looking for.

[00:13:30] Yeah. I hope that that was, was simple enough. It's it's funny. It's always, this, this exercise is always challenging. 

[00:13:36] Greg Kubin: [00:13:36] Yeah, no, I think that was clear. I appreciate that. Who is buying your medicine? 

[00:13:43] Danny Motyka: [00:13:43] First and foremost, we have clinical researchers. I won't name any direct customers just through non-disclosures, but there's organizations like MAPS, there's organizations like Entheon Biomedical in Canada is another one who are developing clinical research protocols that include a therapeutic protocol coupled with a drug

[00:14:03] product to treat a specific indication. So, for example, MAPS is the most famous. They said, we believe that MDMA is going to be effective at treating treatment resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. And so MAPS would then go to a manufacturer and they would say, we need to purchase a kilo of MDMA for this entire

[00:14:24] research and development program that we're going to be putting together. 

[00:14:27] Greg Kubin: [00:14:27] MAPS or the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies is that OG organization that has been named by nearly all of our Business Trip guests. And it's the relentless effort of maps that has helped usher in this Psychedelic Renaissance. Founded in 1986 by Rick Doblin, MAPS was founded to change public perception and public policy around psychedelics and psychedelic research. And in that time

[00:14:51] they've helped to bring it from the underground into legitimate scientific and medical research. MAPS is also the organization that has been sponsoring clinical psychedelic studies around the world. Most notably, a multi-year study, now in phase three, with the FDA, looking at the treatment of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. The results have been very positive to say the least.

[00:15:14] They currently show that for a majority of participants with PTSD, the benefits and relief from MDMA assisted therapy lasted beyond 12 months after the treatment sessions. For this reason, the FDA has designated MDMA assisted therapy, a breakthrough therapy. Phase three trials are expected to be complete in 2022, meaning that the FDA could approve the treatment as soon as 2023.

[00:15:38] Okay. Back to Psygen. 

[00:15:41] Danny Motyka: [00:15:41] And that is really, you know, this is something that Peter always said just, it was day after day. He was always driving home the same question. Man, it's amazing how many people are getting into psychedelic research, but where are they getting their drug products? And for a lot of companies, it almost seemed like an afterthought where they said, we see the value in this.

[00:15:58] We're really excited to go ahead with these plans. And then when they were putting together their applications to the regulators, all of a sudden they needed a source for these products and they just didn't have that. 

[00:16:08] Greg Kubin: [00:16:08] And so today it's the clinical researchers, but in the future is the intention to sell it for on a more mass market basis, not mass market necessarily to consumers, but in the future is the idea to sell it to companies that are then incorporating the drug products into the therapies themselves?

[00:16:28] Danny Motyka: [00:16:28] Well. And so this, this is a fascinating question and it'll depend on how the FDA approves the drug products. So, traditionally, when a new drug product is authorized for market by the FDA, the company that is if they're considered the sponsor, they've put in typically a hundred million plus dollars in this whole phase one or preclinical through phase three research program.

[00:16:53] And in order to kind of incentivize companies to put in all of that effort and spend all of that capital to, um, bring a drug to market they are granted what is called a market authorization, which comes with a period of market exclusivity. So what that is is that on the dataset that is provided to the FDA for the market authorization, that company has exclusivity for a period of typically five years, which means that four or five years, no other company can market that drug.

[00:17:22] So let's just say Johnson and Johnson bring esketamine to market. Now that esketamine product can only be marketed by Johnson and Johnson until the market exclusivity period ends. And at that point, the generic drug producers can then put together their own data packages to submit to the regulators, to then be able to market their own drug.

[00:17:42] So, what's interesting in psychedelics is that a lot of drugs can be marketed to for various indications. And I have, I have depression and I go and get into prescription for an SSRI. I get to go and go to the pharmacy every month and get a refill. But with psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, you get a prescription.

[00:18:00] You don't get to take your drug home. You have to go and take it at a, at a treatment center or at an office. And so what I'm really curious about is what is the FDA approving? Are they approving the drug product for the indication or are they approving the therapeutic protocol, as well? And so essentially what I'm getting at here is that for the first several years, and let's just pretend that Psygen had MAPS' MDMA contract. For the first five years

[00:18:27] could Psygen only sell to MAPS and then MAPS would have to distribute to various clinics that were actually conducting the psychotherapy, or would MAPS be able to sub-license that market authorization, let's say to, you know, a clinic that opened up a treatment center that MAPS had then authorized their therapeutic protocol to be used. Would Psygen be able to sell directly to that clinic, or would we still have to sell it through MAPS?

[00:18:50] Because technically maps is the only sponsor that would be able to market this product. So, essentially right now it feels that our customer is going to be these clinical trial sponsors. And that for the first five to eight years, because market exclusivity is eight years in Canada, which just accounts for our smaller population, but similar costs to bring a drug to market.

[00:19:10] We expect that our, the primary customers will be the sponsors, but at that point, that market exclusivity ends Psygen and then can bring our generic drug products to market. 

[00:19:20] Greg Kubin: [00:19:20] How has Health Canada differed in their approach to regulating psychedelic drugs versus the FDA? 

[00:19:29] Danny Motyka: [00:19:29] So to my knowledge, the FDA has authorized special access for MDMA for PTSD in certain at risk populations, they're authorizing these breakthrough medicine designations to try and help fast track various psychedelic therapies through the drug approval pathway.

[00:19:46] To my knowledge, Health Canada has not recognized psychedelics with the same potential. But just recently what Health Canada has done, which kind of shocked a lot of people is they authorized several patients who applied for exemption applications to be able to possess and use psilocybin for their end of life anxiety, because they're all terminal cancer patients.

[00:20:08] And in Canada, we have an interesting line in our regulations that basically states that all drugs listed in Part J of the food and drugs regulations are exempt from the special access program. So, the expectation was actually that the health minister would reject all of these applications for use of psilocybin for end of life anxiety, thus mounting a court case and paving the way for the same legal result is how cannabis became medically accessible in 1999 in Canada.

[00:20:34] But instead of doing that, the health minister has approved that. And so to my knowledge, health Canada is actually trying to work with some of these pioneer groups in Canada and figure out how they can help create psychedelics into medicines in the safest way possible. 

[00:20:47] Greg Kubin: [00:20:47] Nice. That's encouraging. Good

[00:20:48] first step. What kind of licenses does Psygen need to manufacture psychedelics? 

[00:20:56] Danny Motyka: [00:20:56] No drug is illegal. They're all just restricted. And so in Canada, psychedelics, aren't technically illegal, but possessing them without an exemption or without a license is illegal and selling them or producing them without a license is illegal.

[00:21:09] But in order to do those things legally, all you need to do is apply for what is called a dealer's license in Canada. And in order to apply for that dealer's license, you just need to put together an application to the minister that describes why you believe you should be able to produce these substances.

[00:21:23] In Psygen's case, we have received letters of intent from various researchers around the world that have stated this purpose, that they need access to GMP psychedelic drug products, and they don't exist. So we have this justification to the minister, and then you need to demonstrate that you're doing everything in your power to prevent

[00:21:39] any supply flowing through your authorized production into illicit markets. And as long as you can demonstrate to the minister that there is a need and that you're doing everything that is required in the directive on physical security, then the minister essentially has to grant you your license.

[00:21:55] Greg Kubin: [00:21:55] In a previous interview, I actually was talking with Ryan Zurrer about the topic of the synthetic psychedelic versus the natural psychedelic and psilocybin in particular. Do you have an opinion about the difference from a efficacy standpoint or an experiential standpoint? 

[00:22:15] Danny Motyka: [00:22:15] I love that podcast by the way.

[00:22:17] And I definitely wanted to give my, thanks to Ryan for his kind words that he expressed about Psygen. And you know about what we're doing and with respect to natural products versus synthetic psilocybin, my sense is that the efficacy for psilocybin to treat depression is proven by the clinical trials that have been ongoing.

[00:22:37] There's this idea of the entourage effect in cannabis. And there's a lot of companies betting that the entourage effect in psilocybin or in psilocybe mushrooms is going to be just as important as it is in cannabis. 

[00:22:48] Greg Kubin: [00:22:48] The entourage effect is a theory from the world of cannabis. It proposes that the individual compounds in a particular psychoactive plant can act together in all through the overall psychoactive effect.

[00:22:59] Basically in psychedelic terms, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[00:23:06] Danny Motyka: [00:23:06] I am a big supporter of the natural product movement. I think that people should have access to these plant medicines if that's the form that they should choose to use. But I think that because right now the data package that will be submitted to the FDA for psilocybin is based on a synthetic product that

[00:23:23] at first, a lot of medical professionals are going to prefer to prescribe the synthetic psilocybin drug products instead of natural products. But you're definitely going to see what I, what I believe is we'll definitely see kind of a divergence in the psilocybin market of people who would prefer a synthetic product and people who would prefer a natural product. I do believe that there's going to be a difference when you're eating

[00:23:45] mushrooms or you're taking mushroom products versus psilocybin. And I think that there will be pros and cons. I think that there are definitely some benefits of synthetic product. It's just the scalability. Well, save mushrooms. I mean, mushroom cultivation is extremely scalable, but for something like Mescaline or something like Ayahuasca, I think that the

[00:24:06] synthetic route can be more scalable. My sense is there's going to be some challenges too. I mean, mushrooms produce a lot of toxins like eating that much fungal biomass and all that chitin can produce gastrointestinal upset and cramping and bloating and stuff. So I think that there might be some benefits to taking synthetic products for, for some people.

[00:24:25] Yeah. I don't know. I'm, I'm so excited to see where this goes, but fundamentally I believe we need access to natural products. And I do believe that synthetic products are going to be preferred at first by medical practitioners and my sense is that Psygen is going to end up focusing more on the synthetic products like LSD, MDMA, 2C-B drugs that don't have a natural alternative and maybe some other drugs like ibogaine or potentially Mescaline whose natural products are on the endangered or at-risk species.

[00:24:55] Greg Kubin: [00:24:55] One other topic, by the way that we didn't cover that. I just wanted to touch on briefly to get your thoughts on is the different approaches to synthesizing psychedelic compounds and for example, fermentation being another approach. And how do you think about that? Is it a potentially effective alternative?

[00:25:15] Danny Motyka: [00:25:15] Yeah, absolutely. And Psygen is, Psygen has, we have made some bets on fermentation, on biotechnology in general. Eventually we believe that it will become efficient enough to look at large-scale fermentation pathways to do bioproduction of psilocybin. Potentially other drugs as well. There's also a hybrid approach where you look to do some synthetic chemistry, and then you can use purified enzymes to do other synthetic steps that just help it become a little bit more efficient.

[00:25:45] Something that I think needs to be really looked at as the downstream processing. So it's an expensive process. And then you end up with this volume of liquid that contains the active ingredient that you're looking for, and then you need to filter it, you need to extract or isolate whatever you've produced, and then you need to go through the purification.

[00:26:01] And so we need to really look at what scale does it become more economic and more efficient to do this. But my sense also is that eventually, you know, you could probably make an argument that environmentally it's going to become preferable. So I think there are some molecules that it just isn't really going to make sense.

[00:26:16] The chemical synthesis is just so quick and easy and cheap that you're not going to be able to have a biosynthetic pathway that's competitive. But certainly there's another benefit in that if an enzyme is flexible enough with the precursor, that it can take, that you could stitch out a whole library of potential psychedelic molecules, much quicker and much more effectively than you could with just chemical synthesis alone.

[00:26:37] Greg Kubin: [00:26:37] Which are that compounds that are easier through synthesis? 

[00:26:41] Danny Motyka: [00:26:41] So ketamine is one that's produced on mass in China and India. And so those manufacturing, plants and processes are just so huge that the scale is, it's really incredibly efficient. And then I would also say that MDMA is also probably quite a cheap and easy molecule to manufacture by a chemical synthesis.

[00:26:59] And because it doesn't have a natural organism, it would be more costly to try and create genes or find genes in nature that create other molecules that could then be used and pieced together to create something like MDMA when the chemical synthesis is already so efficient. 

[00:27:12] Greg Kubin: [00:27:12] I know that one of the components of Psygen that I find to be really inspiring is the percentage of profits that you plan on donating to causes.

[00:27:22] Can you, can you talk a little bit about it? 

[00:27:24] Danny Motyka: [00:27:24] Yeah, so essentially, when I was first coming up with a business plan before I met Peter and for Psygen I wanted to create this nonprofit entity and a lot of the advisors or mentors in my life were telling me that I was crazy. That to raise the amount of capital that was required to build a lab that we'd have to go the kind of for-profit route.

[00:27:41] And so Peter had experienced something similar, uh, when he first set up Psygen, he had set up a research foundation that was a nonprofit. Managed to collect about a million and a half dollars in, in funds, but when we're looking at building out a commercial facility it was really apparent that in order to raise five to $10 million over several years, that we would need to build out a lab, we would need access to capital

[00:28:00] that was hard to attract from pure philanthropy alone. So, when we were looking to build the company, we were looking at opportunities to still live that thread of generosity or public benefit. And so that was when we realized that even as a for-profit entity, if, and when things are going well, you have the opportunity and the freedom to donate a percentage of your profits to noble causes and something that we recognized very early on is that the foundations for this ecosystem or this industry that's emerging is built upon non-profits and research foundations that have depended on philanthropy for the last 30 years, arguably with Haffter Institute and MAPS, just as two that have raised significant amounts of capital and have made significant progress for

[00:28:42] what we now all have this opportunity to play in. And so how we have seen the ability to give back is that we could donate a percentage of our profits back into those research foundations and nonprofits so that they can continue to develop foundations. So, when drug costs, which is the smallest cost of the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is going to be so small, but covered by insurance likely.

[00:29:03] You know, how can we help support access to so many people that won't be able to afford the psychedelic medicine?

[00:29:13] Greg Kubin: [00:29:13] The reality is there aren't many companies that have the knowledge and risk appetite to manufacturer psychedelics. Most of which are still illegal and Schedule 1 substances. You can say that's actually Psygen's competitive advantage. And if they deliver on the GMP manufacturing standards that they envision,

[00:29:30] Psygen is positioned to be a top choice for researchers and clinicians as the industry blossoms. In fact, they've already entered agreements to supply DMT and synthetic psilocybin for clinical trials, and recently announced their intention to go public this year. 

[00:29:44] This is Business Trip, a podcast about psychedelic entrepreneurship.

[00:29:48] If you liked this episode, you can help us by subscribing to the podcast and leaving a review. You can tweet at us or find us on the Gram at businesstripfm. And if you're building a company in psychedelics or you're looking to get more involved in this space, email me  at greg@businesstrip.fm. 

[00:30:05] I'm your host, Greg Kubin. Business Trip is created by me and Matias Serebrinsky. Producer and editor is Jonathan Davis. Sound design and engineering came from Zach Frank. Our theme music is by Dorian Love and additional music credits are in the show notes. This is Business Trip. Thanks for tripping with us. We'll see you

[00:30:24] next time.

[00:30:32] Danny Motyka: [00:30:32] I took them to my dad after I got them. And I asked him if this was what I can expect and or if, if they were the mushrooms that I was looking for and he laughed and he told me that they would probably taste like dirty socks. And if they did that, they were the mushrooms that I was looking for.