Australian Startup Exploring Psychedelics Through VR Tech

The psychedelics market has exploded in recent years with a rush of interest from investors.

The craze has been fuelled by the potential surrounding novel drug products using psychedelic compounds, which companies think could help advance the treatment of mental health conditions.

Now one company in Australia is attempting to bring together the psychedelics revolution and virtual reality (VR) technology. By combining these two novel approaches to medicine, the researchers behind Enosis Therapeutics believe they can greatly enhance the effects of psychedelic medicine.

The company has created a suite of VR scenarios that patients can view using goggles while undergoing psychedelic therapy sessions. Enosis Therapeutics sees patients using these VR tools alongside a medical guide.

The Investing News Network (INN) spoke with the co-leads of Enosis Therapeutics, VR researcher Agnieszka Sekula and psychedelics expert Dr. Prashanth Puspanathan, about the current landscape for psychedelics in Australia and what’s ahead for their company. The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How do VR and psychedelics work together?

INN: Could you start by introducing the origins of Enosis Therapeutics?

Agnieszka Sekula: I had been doing research with VR for a few years before I met Prash, in different fields of medicine for medical research. Then I slowly started moving more towards the strategic use of VR out of the interest on the impact VR has on the emotional state or the perceptual aspects of immersion.

When I switched my career towards neuroscience, and towards clinical psychology, I started to recognize how VR could impact that field and help push mental health innovation, which has been lagging behind any innovations in medicine for a long, long time.

With my background in VR and the experience I had seeing how people respond to being immersed in the VR world, the potential that it has, it became quite clear early on that this could be a good way of adding on to what psychedelic psychotherapy has to offer at the moment.

We came to the conclusion that using different altered state modalities might be beneficial in attributing settings to provide more synergistic outcomes and more benefits to patients.

INN: Does your VR business model work in tandem with the proposed novel psychedelic drugs being worked on right now?

Dr. Prashanth Puspanathan: We’re in waiting mode, and we are going to be in waiting mode for a little while, which I think is the curse of drug development.

For us, anything that happens in the drug development space is a good thing because it just enlarges the industry.

Our product is meant to be condition agnostic and substance agnostic. There are slight tweaks depending on things like timing of action and substance.

We have designed it just to act as a psychotherapeutic tool; therefore, as long as psychotherapy is an essential component of the psychedelic therapy process, then we see our product as having a role.

INN: Could you provide a breakdown of how exactly these two methods come together to support treatment with psychedelic medicine? In the long term, do you see patients being able to use this tool at home, or is it designed to be used strictly in a clinic?

AS: Prash and I are big supporters of using psychedelics in a treatment setting, with a therapist or a psychiatrist or a medical professional. We are certainly targeting clinicians and clinics with our product, and hoping that the adoption of this protocol and VR scenarios will be through clinics.

We’re working directly with therapists and medical professionals to implement this at their clinics with their protocols. (We’re interested in) clinics that are very experienced in the psychedelic space. We don’t really want to target anyone who’s just starting out in this space.

The more future goal is to be able to extend that integration into a therapy process for as long as possible, because research shows that adding on those sessions and having longer periods of engagement with a therapist does add on to the benefits that the patient sees.

INN: VR technology has come a long way, but there are still a few hiccups preventing it from going mainstream in a serious way. By combining VR and psychedelics is there any concern about side effects for users who will approach this therapy?

AS: There are certainly exclusion criteria that we need to look at before we apply this. If we use this as an adjunct to psychedelic therapy, a lot of those exclusions are already taken care of just by being admitted to psychedelic therapy itself.

There are some potential risks associated with epilepsy or seizures for people who are prone to that. So nausea and any severe problems with sight will impact the experience with VR. These are the main side effects that we are concerned with.

In our scenarios, we feel quite confident that we’ve mitigated all the side effects, and we did the test that we’ve done in case studies with only four participants.

We’re going to know much more after we’ve conducted the clinical trial, and we’ve tested it with a larger number of patients. But yes, in terms of the stimulus that we’re providing, it’s subtle enough that we feel quite confident that there’s very, very little risk of having any side effects.

Australia’s developing psychedelics market

INN: The North American capital markets have really embraced psychedelics opportunities in terms of investments. What does the situation look like in Australia?

PP: There’s a lot of stuff bubbling in the background; we’ve had realistically only one trial actually underway. But there are about three or four trials which have either just started or are currently recruiting.

The short answer is on the research front, there’s stuff happening. On the commercial front, it’s far more limited. I think Australia has most certainly been a little bit behind.

Australia has a very strong biotech commercialization record, and it also has a very favourable series of tax incentives and grants for early stage research and development companies, which is sort of surprising that more isn’t happening here. I think purely it is just a matter of time.

INN: What’s next for you? Are there any plans for a public listing of sorts, and if so, would that be in Australia or abroad?

PP: We’re definitely not in a hurry to list at this stage ⁠— we have been entirely self-funded. There’s been a lot of early interest even before launching the capital raise. I think that speaks to the fact that investors globally recognize the technology is underutilised in the psychedelic space.

We are planning a post-capital raise, which will kick off in the next couple of months. We’re hoping to be quite selective about who we take capital from. And primarily, we want to be able to pick our partners appropriately towards getting us to the greatest amount of adoption.

We’re in the process of onboarding our first clients, and that’s very exciting and interesting for us, at least from a capital-raising perspective and the market validation that that will give us. It’s going to be a huge step up.

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Securities Disclosure: I, Bryan Mc Govern, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.

Editorial Disclosure: The Investing News Network does not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the information reported in the interviews it conducts. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not reflect the opinions of the Investing News Network and do not constitute investment advice. All readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence.

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