MindMed, Forian Developing Personalized Psychiatry for Anxiety Disorders

Psychedelic medicine company MindMed and information solutions provider Forian are partnering to leverage real-world health data to create personalized treatments for psychiatry patients suffering from anxiety disorders.

MindMed and Forian are collaborating to develop best practices for the use of real-world evidence to support clinical decision-making. Large, real-world datasets can be used to drive discovery and connections that can be missed in individual, episodic health visits. Patterns can emerge when a patient’s multiple visits are seen in the context of a representative population.

Many areas of clinical practice are shifting towards personalized medicine to meet patient needs. To date, personalized medicine has seen success in some areas, such as oncology, but according to a 2013 research paper, there are few such examples in psychiatry to date. 

Personalized psychiatry is the idea that an individual’s unique physiology plays a role in their vulnerability to disease and their response to specific therapies. Based on this assumption, the goal of personalized psychiatry is to predict a person’s susceptibility to developing an illness and optimize the most favorable treatment by reducing the risk of side effects or avoiding certain treatments. It offers the potential to administer tailored mental health treatments in a preventative rather than reactive manner and, in theory, it could lead to lower health costs.

“Our goal is to use real-world healthcare data and deep digital phenotyping to achieve in-depth, precise, and personalized characterizations of individuals with generalized anxiety disorders and other conditions of interest for our drug development programs,” said MindMed Chief Medical Officer Dr. Dan Karlin. “By fully acknowledging each person’s physiology, environment, and behavioral stressors, we ultimately aim for integrated digital deep diagnoses to drive precision psychiatry for drug development and clinical treatment across our target therapeutic areas.”

Based in New York City, MindMed is focused on assembling a drug development pipeline of innovative treatments based on psychedelic substances, including psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT, and an Ibogaine derivative, 18-MC. The company is currently conducting several clinical trials using psychedelic-inspired medicines, including studying LSD experiential therapy for anxiety, LSD microdosing for adult ADHD, and 18-MC for opioid withdrawal.

Forian provides software solutions, propriety data, and predictive analytics for companies in the life sciences, healthcare, and cannabis sectors. The company is experienced in real-world evidence and outcome studies, having developed a variety of information products to support comprehensive clinical and commercial decision-making in the healthcare industry. “Forian understands the power our real-world evidence and unique data sets add to our healthcare and pharmaceutical partners,” said Forian CEO Dan Barton. “We are thrilled to collaborate with MindMed to help them deliver insights to improve the health of psychiatric patients.”