Psychedelic Alpha’s Josh Hardman speaks with Compass Pathways CEO, Kabir Nath, about a range of topics: from the company’s recently-announced agreements that could shed light on what the roll-out of COMP360 psilocybin therapy might look like, through to the motivation behind its distinctive ‘psychological support’ model and Nath’s thoughts on a competitor’s fast follower strategy.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Footnotes were added by Psychedelic Alpha and do not reflect statements made by the interviewee.
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Josh Hardman, Founder & Editor, Psychedelic Alpha: In the first instance, I wanted to ask you about these recent agreements with Greenbrook TMS and Hackensack Meridian. Tell me about those and what they might suggest about the types of locations that you imagine your psilocybin therapy, COMP360 being delivered in, if approved.
Kabir Nath, CEO, Compass Pathways: Obviously, our core focus is getting the trials done right now. But a lot of our time is spent thinking about: How will this commercialise? How will this scale? And that’s the question we get a lot from investors.
So what we’ve done is we’ve identified a number of potential different settings of care where psilocybin could be used. Greenbrook and Hackensack are two very different examples of those. There are a few more places we’re working with, and you can expect to see a few more announcements, but it’ll be a limited number and they’re all going to be quite different in terms of the settings of care.
What are we trying to do here? Well, to begin with, this truly is learning. So it’s for us to learn much more about how patients with treatment-resistant depression end up in these settings of care. How do they go to a Greenbrook? How are they referred? How are the treatment choices made today?
Someone like Greenbrook already does TMS, Spravato, ketamine; they already have some of the physical infrastructure. What else are they going to need to do? It’s frankly not just psilocybin, but this is also going to be helpful for MDMA. What sort of physical setting, and how is this going to integrate into their practical workflow, and the reimbursement workflow? In each of those cases, these are the learnings.
So we have Greenbrook, a commercial, for profit interventional psychiatry company; and Hackensack, a classic, integrated, regional health system that’s a tertiary, key referral centre with three hundred inpatient beds. It’s a very different patient population but exactly the same questions. How does that population get there? How are treatment choices made? How are they going to integrate psychedelics?
In each of these cases, the people we’re signing up with have clearly told us they believe that psychedelics should be one more tool for their psychiatrists. So, they already believe—subject to clinical data—that this needs to be another tool for this population with treatment-resistant depression who have very few choices.
Obviously, we’re not going to be able to cover every phenotype of care setting. But with several of them, what we would look to do ahead of launch is actually take these ‘templates’ or learnings and then expand to other centres in the pre-launch marketing activities.
So that’s what we’re doing. It really is a mutual learning exercise, and again, it’s important for us at Compass to continue to deliver to investors, and potential investors, proof that we’re actually making progress and understanding the commercial challenges.
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