Drug discovery and development company Mindset Pharma has filed an international patent application for a novel method to synthesize psilocybin, enabling faster and cheaper production of the psychedelic compound than other established methodologies currently being used.
CEO James Lanthier says the company’s propriety synthesis process is likely the most cost-effective method available in the marketplace today for cGMP grade psilocybin, which is the active psychoactive chemical compound in “magic” mushrooms.
“It’s not practical to extract it from the mushroom,” Lanthier explains, “so really the only way to get to really pure psilocybin is through chemical synthesis.”
“There really haven’t been many advancements in the standard methodologies for getting there, and this was really an innovation that MindSet’s scientific team was able to bring,” Lanthier continues. “They were able to come up with innovations to condense the number of different steps in getting to psilocybin. So, based on our research, we think we’re able to get to psilocybin in fewer steps than any of the other published methods.”
Other advantages of this method to synthesize psilocybin, according to the company, include milder reaction conditions, more convenient operations, easily obtained commercially available raw materials, suitability for multi-kilogram scale manufacturing, and a reduced environmental impact.
Based in Toronto, Canada, Mindset Pharma is focused on creating novel and patentable psychedelic compounds for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders with unmet medical needs. The company is assembling a proprietary library of intellectual property across four novel families of psychedelic-inspired compounds.
This is the final stage in the patent process after a provisional application was filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in July of 2020. The patent will cover Mindset Pharma’s process for synthesizing two of the known active compounds in psychedelic mushrooms – psilocybin and psilocin.
With many institutions and companies around the world conducting pre-clinical and clinical studies that are investigating the therapeutic potential of psilocybin and other psychedelics, there is an increasing need for the commercial production of standardized forms of these compounds for use in this research, and ultimately to be used in psychedelic medicines.
The company’s Vice President of Innovation Malik Slassi added that Mindset Pharma had made significant progress in demonstrating the commercial viability of its synthesis process since the company filed its provisional patent in July last year. “To date, significant optimization work has been completed and we are now initiating a 100g pilot-scale synthesis to be followed by a 1kg batch of cGMP psilocybin [that is] expected to be completed by the end of 2021,” Slassi said.
