Compass Pathways has raised $80 million to prepare its psilocybin therapy for phase 3 development. The London-based biotech is advancing the drug, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, for use in people with treatment-resistant depression.
Psilocybin was studied in the 1960s, but research ground to a halt over the following decades. Teams at academic centers including the University of California, Los Angeles, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, Imperial College London and the University of Zurich helped resurrect interest in psilocybin in recent years, overcoming constraints on the study of the molecule to generate evidence of its effectiveness in hard-to-treat patients.
Compass has picked up the baton from those researchers, raising a £25 million ($31 million) series A and generating data from healthy volunteers on the safety of psilocybin therapy. With the end of a phase 2b on the horizon, Compass has raised money for the next chapter in its story.
