Australian startups rethink psychedelic therapy

Australia is quickly becoming a global test case for psychedelic healing therapy. Two local startups, Enosis Therapeutics and Psylo, are taking different approaches to it through technology. While Enosis is a pioneer in virtual reality (VR) tools to support integrative therapy, Psylo is developing synthetic psychedelic-inspired compounds that offer non-hallucinogenic therapeutic potential.

In July 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to legalize psychedelic-assisted therapies for conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) decision means licensed psychiatrists can prescribe psilocybin and MDMA as controlled medicines.

However, implementation has been slow and has faced many obstacles. These include regulatory barriers, high costs, and a limited number of trained therapists.

As a result, it is estimated that at the time of writing, fewer than 20 people have undertaken psychedelic therapy in Australia.

Both Enosis Therapeutics and Psylo believe this change in regulation in Australia is a step in the right direction. However, the barrier to entry is high.

Australian laws are tightly controlled – something both companies see as an advantage – requiring ethics approval for each patient and supervision by trained psychiatrists.

Enosis founder and CEO Prash Puspanathan has raised concerns about Australia’s readiness for widespread use of psychedelic therapy, highlighting the high human resource costs associated with the therapy, noting that “(you can’t) just go and queue up at your GP and take home a dose of psychedelic. That’s certainly not the case.”

Josh Ismin, co-founder and CEO of Psylo, shares some of these concerns.

“The take-off of psilocybin and MDMA administration will be very slow in this country,” Ismin said. SmartCompany.

But he noted that Australia’s approach could serve as a model for other countries trying to navigate the complexities of integrating psychedelic substances into mainstream health care.

“Australia is basically a global regulatory experiment right now,” Ismin said.

Enosis Therapeutics Wants to Optimize Psychedelic Therapy with VR

Enosis Therapeutics is tackling one of the biggest barriers to psychedelic therapy: cost.

Founder and CEO Puspanathan believes virtual reality could be a way to automate and streamline some of the more resource-intensive aspects of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

These include an “integration” phase that follows the dosing session and involves regular psychotherapy sessions to help patients process and apply the insights gained during the psychedelic experience.

The goal of Enosis is not to replace the psychedelic experience itself, but rather to reduce the need for constant human supervision.

“The mushroom is fine. We don’t have to play with it,” Puspanathan said SmartCompany.

“Nature has evolved over millennia to be a pretty good instrument. But it’s the human element of the process that’s really the low-hanging fruit that we should consider optimizing.”

The company has developed a VR tool that helps patients revisit observations from psychedelic sessions in a virtual environment, allowing them to analyze those observations over time.

According to Puspanathan, the integration phase is crucial because the insights gained during a psychedelic session fade over time.

“Integration, the weekly psychotherapy, is basically taking the lessons learned from the dosing session and implementing them, integrating them into your future life,” Puspanathan said.

The Enosis VR tool helps patients consolidate these insights immediately after the session and return to them in a more structured, immersive way during subsequent integration sessions.

This tool acts as an “anchor” of sorts for the psychedelic experience, allowing patients to continue to enjoy the therapeutic benefits even when the effects of the dosing session begin to wear off.

“We’ve designed an eight-week integration program that comes together in a very linear way that you go through. Every answer you come up with, every analysis of previous observations, is added as voice recordings to the existing model that you’re starting to build,” Puspanathan said.

“You create a mind map or a memory palace — whatever you want to call it — in this three-dimensional landscape that you interact with and engage with.”

Puspanathan emphasizes that the goal of therapy is to make the unconscious conscious — to bring things hidden in the brain to the surface where they can be interacted with and understood.

“Now we’re adding another layer to that by planting it in the landscape where it’s sustainable and diverse,” Puspanathan said.

In a small study in the Netherlands, Enosis found a 90% match between emotional and psychological perceptions captured in VR and those experienced during f-dosing sessions. Puspanathan sees this as a promising step toward making the therapy more scalable.

“If we can deliver something that may not quite match the effectiveness of face-to-face therapy, but instead of costing $2,000 for 10 sessions, we can do the same thing at home for $50 and have a 50% success rate, then I think we’ve done it,” Puspanathan said.

Psylo wants to offer benefits without the need to travel

Psylo took a different approach to psychedelic therapy by developing synthetic compounds inspired by psychedelic substances.

However, unlike psilocybin or MDMA, these compounds were developed to eliminate the hallucinogenic properties, offering patients therapeutic benefits without the need for intense, supervised psychedelic experiences.

Josh Ismin, co-founder and CEO of Psylo, explained that the company is focused on creating new compounds — known as neuroplastogens — that target the same receptors as traditional psychedelic substances but do not cause hallucinations.

“We envision a product that is ultimately bioavailable. So it can be taken as a medication, like traditional antidepressants, but it has a faster onset of action and fewer side effects than traditional SSRIs, which are associated with a host of adverse side effects, such as loss of libido, weight gain, insomnia, and more,” Ismin said. SmartCompany.

Like Enosis, Psylo wants to make therapy more affordable and accessible than it currently is—specifically, psychedelic-assisted therapy, which requires two clinical supervisors.

“It’s not going to happen for a number of reasons — the costs and the oversight that’s required. Ultimately, it’s going to be a slow rollout and it’s going to remain a relatively small operation,” Ismin said.

Psylo is preparing to begin clinical trials and hopes to demonstrate that its compounds can offer similar therapeutic benefits without the need to induce hallucinogenic experiences.

Interestingly, Psylo plans to change its image as it moves away from viewing itself as a company dealing in psychedelic substances.

Ismin noted that the name “Psylo” was good for getting attention early on in her journey, but it doesn’t accurately reflect her goals or future products. After all, she doesn’t actually use psychedelic substances.

The shift is partly driven by the need to attract biotech investors who are more focused on the science behind therapies than the psychedelic narrative.

And it’s already happening. After raising $5 million in 2022, Psylo announced a “first close” of $7.5 million in seed funding earlier this year. And it hopes to close with an additional $4.5 million by the end of the year.

Who knows, maybe the next time we talk about the company we will call it something different.

Never miss a story: sign up to SmartCompany free daily newsletter and find our best stories on LinkedIn.