Navigating Mental Health
This week I am talking to Ekaterina Malievskaia MD MScPH, Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder of COMPASS Pathways (Navigating Mental Health Pathways). Ekaterina is an entrepreneur dedicated to bringing about positive change in society with a particular focus on health and wellbeing and driven to address the challenge of access to brain health services.
Ekaterina shares her personal experience with accessing mental health services for her son in the US – a journey that took years and left her and her family feeling there had to be a better way. As part of her research, she found a small study on 9 patients with OCD treated with Psilocybin. Thanks to regulatory categorization research have been limited but what has been shown offers great promise for “transdiagnostic” potential for these classes of drugs. In fact, Sandoz manufactured and sold Psilocybin (IndoCybin) for a number of years withdrawing from the market for economic reasons before the worldwide crackdown.
We discuss the work of Compass and their team of researchers who are focused on driving
Patient Access to evidence based interventions
This is a big part of how and why they are able to drive innovation and access with a team-based approach that includes regulators and payers alongside clinicians and patients. They moved the focus from the substances such as Psilocybin to a focus on patients and how they can bring positive outcomes. We talk about the breakthrough status awarded to their psilocybin therapy program for treatment-resistant depression, a major feat given the statistics, and their phase 2B trial that has 20 sites in 9 countries.
We discuss their approach which as Ekaterina describes as living and breathing the incremental approach:
“The Day in a life of a small agile innovation company is full off incremental steps”
which only become noticeable as they look back since they become part of the fabric of their innovation journey
Listen in to hear about their future which is anchored on “Regulatory Innovation” with their partnership approach and is essential to success to allow them to make the “highly technical climb” involved in this area.
Listen live at 4:00 AM, 12:00 Noon or 8:00 PM ET, Monday through Friday for the next week at HealthcareNOW Radio. After that, you can listen on demand (See podcast information below.) Join the conversation on Twitter at #TheIncrementalist.
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