The story about Compass Pathways’ new patent first broke in a press release on Monday:
COMPASS Pathways, a mental health care company, announced today that it has been granted US Patent No 10,519,175, relating to methods of treating drug-resistant depression with a psilocybin formulation, by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The patent covers the use of COMPASS's synthesised investigational psilocybin formulation, COMP360, in a psilocybin therapy protocol for patients with treatment-resistant depression. Psilocybin is an active ingredient in so-called 'magic mushrooms'.
Last month, COMPASS reported that COMP360 was well tolerated when administered to healthy adult volunteers with support from specially trained therapists in a randomised placebo-controlled trial. COMPASS is currently running a phase IIb clinical trial of COMP360 in treatment-resistant depression.This trial is recruiting 216 patients from across Europe and North America who suffer with depression that hasn't responded to established medications, and will be the largest clinical trial of a psilocybin formulation to date. In 2018, COMPASS received FDA "Breakthrough Therapy" designation for its programme of psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
Although this wasn’t a clear description of what the patent actually covers, fortunately the patent’s abstract clarified things a little bit:
This invention relates to the large-scale production of psilocybin for use in medicine. More particularly, it relates to a method of obtaining high purity crystalline psilocybin, particularly, in the form of Polymorph A. It further relates to a method for the manufacture of psilocybin and intermediates in the production thereof and formulations containing psilocybin.
So it turns out that Compass received a patent for its new method of creating large quantities of crystalline psilocybin, which you might recall Psychedelic Science Review covered a couple weeks ago, when Barb Bauer explored how this new crystal form could catalyze the development of new pharmaceutical psychedelics.
Regardless of whether you think pharmaceutical psychedelics should exist or not, make no mistake—they’re coming. Fast.