About

Today, my guest is Lars Christian Wilde, the President, Chief Business Officer and Co‑founder of Compass Pathways. Compass is a “mental health care company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health.” as they describe themselves. Compass was one of the first companies engaging in a bigger vision of the substance psilocybin. But back to Lars. He is a special guest to me, since I like his open mind. I remember talking to Lars in one of our first podcasts about vaccine against depression in the future. I also remember how openly Lars talked about his treatment-resistant depression and anxiety disorder and the effects it had on him and the people in his life. He told me about his treatment with psilocybin, that helped him tremendously to begin a new life with a different mental health set. I am always a fan of people, especially entrepreneurs in the psychedelic field, that share their psychedelic experiences and are personally affected by the power of psychedelic substances. In 2020 lot of things have happened at Compass Pathways. In September 2020 the company became a public company, listing their stock on Nasdaq and raising $146.6 million. Compass became one of the most exciting company in the field. Lars and I catch up, what is happening in the Compass World right now. How does a psychedelic public company feels and works different? How does the Compass and Sheppard Pratt collaboration look like, since Compass is opening a Centre of Excellence in collaboration with The Sheppard Pratt Institute for Advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Baltimore, Maryland, to do more research. Their psychiatry department exists since the 1800s. We talk about how Compass works with the Charité hospital in Berlin and how to do conduct a study in times of Covid at all, we discuss COMP360, a psilocybin therapy trial for treatment-resistant depression designed by Compass for future treatments of depression (https://compasspathways.com/)