How Psylo and Enosis Therapeutics are using tech to tackle medicinal psychedelics

Australia is quickly becoming a global test case for medicinal psychedelic therapy. Two local startups, Enosis Therapeutics and Psylo, are taking distinct approaches to it through tech. While Enosis is pioneering virtual reality (VR) tools to support integration therapy, Psylo is developing synthetic compounds inspired by psychedelics that offer non-hallucinogenic therapeutic potential.

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

The decision from the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) means authorised psychiatrists are able to prescribe psilocybin and MDMA as controlled medicines.

However, the rollout has been slow and has faced multiple hurdles. These include regulatory barriers, high costs, and a limited pool of trained therapists.

As a result, it’s estimated less than 20 people have been treated with psychedelic therapy in Australia at the time of writing

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

Australia’s legal framework is highly controlled — which both companies see as a positive — requiring ethics approval for each patient and the supervision of trained psychiatrists.

Enosis co-founder and CEO Prash Puspanathan expressed concerns about Australia’s readiness for widespread implementation of psychedelic therapy, highlighting the high human resource costs involved in therapy, noting “[you can’t just] just go and line up with your GP and take home a dose of psychedelic. This is certainly not the case”.

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

“It’s going to be a very slow start for the administration of psilocybin and MDMA in this country,” Ismin said to SmartCompany.

However, he noted Australia’s approach could serve as a model for other countries navigating the complexities of integrating psychedelics into mainstream healthcare.

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

Enosis Therapeutics wants to optimise psychedelic therapy with VR

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

Its approach is largely based on the research of its co-founder, Agnieszka Sekula, who has a background in biomedical engineering and medical imaging.

Puspanathan sees VR as a way to automate and streamline some of the more resource-intensive aspects of psychedelic-assisted therapy.

This includes the ‘integration’ phase, which follows the dosing session and involves regular psychotherapy sessions to help patients process and apply the insights gained from their psychedelic experience.

Enosis isn’t looking to replace the psychedelic experience itself but rather to reduce the need for constant human oversight.

“The mushroom is just fine. We do not need to mess with the mushroom,” Puspanathan said to SmartCompany.

“Nature has evolved over millennia to be quite a fine instrument. But it’s the human element of the process which really is the low-hanging fruit that we should be looking at how we can optimise.”

The company has developed a VR tool to help patients revisit insights from their psychedelic sessions in a virtual environment, allowing them to engage with these insights over time.

According to Puspanathan, the integration phase is crucial because the insights gained from a psychedelic session tend to weaken as time passes.

“Integration, which is once-a-week psychotherapy, is to essentially take the lessons that emerge from the dosing session and put it into practice, integrate it into your life going forward,” Puspanathan said.

The Enosis VR tool helps patients capture those insights immediately after their session and revisit them in a more structured, immersive way during subsequent integration sessions.

The tool serves as a sort of ‘anchor’ to the psychedelic experience, allowing patients to access the therapeutic benefits even after the effects of the dosing session begin to fade.

“We’ve built out an eight-week integration program that meets in a very linear fashion, that you go through. Every answer you come up with, every analysis of previous insights, is added in the form of voice recordings to the existing model you’re starting to create,” Puspanathan said.

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

Puspanathan makes the point that the therapy’s purpose is to make the unconscious conscious — to bring the things tucked away in your brain to the surface, where you can interact with and understand them.

“Now we’re adding another layer to it by planting that onto a landscape where it’s permanent and additive,” Puspanathan said.

In a small trial in the Netherlands, Enosis found a 90% match between the emotional and psychological insights captured in VR and those experienced during the dosing session f. Puspanathan believes this is a promising step toward making the therapy more scalable.

“If we are able to provide something which may not entirely be able to replicate the efficacy of face-to-face therapy, but which instead of costing $2,000 for 10 sessions, we can do the same thing for 50 bucks at home and achieve 50% efficacy, then I think we have succeeded,” Puspanathan said.

Psylo wants to offer the benefits without the trip

Psylo has taken a different approach to psychedelic therapy by developing synthetic compounds inspired by psychedelics.

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

Josh Ismin, co-founder and CEO of Psylo, explained the company is focused on creating novel compounds — known as neuroplastogens — which work on the same receptors as traditional psychedelics, but don’t induce hallucinations.

“We envision a product that is ultimately bioavailable. So you can take it as a medication, similar to traditional antidepressants, but it has a faster onset of action and fewer side effects than traditional SSRI medications, which come with a myriad of unfavourable side effects, like loss of libido, weight gain, insomnia and more,” Ismin said to SmartCompany.

Similar to Enosis, Psylo wants to make therapy cheaper and more accessible than what is currently available — particularly the psychedelic assisted therapy that requires two clinical supervisors.

“That won’t happen for a number of reasons — there’s the cost and the supervision that’s required. Ultimately, it will be slow to roll out and will remain a relatively small operation,” Ismin said.

Psylo is preparing to enter clinical trials and hopes to show that its compounds can offer similar therapeutic benefits without the need for hallucinogenic experiences.

Interestingly, Psylo plans to change its branding as it moves away from being viewed as a psychedelics company.

Ismin noted the name ‘Psylo’ was good to attract attention early in its journey, but doesn’t accurately reflect its aims or future products. After all, it doesn’t actually utilise psychedelics.

The change is also partly driven by the need to attract biotech investors more focused on the science behind the therapies rather 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’s hoping to close out with an additional $4.5 million by the end of the year.

Who knows, perhaps the next time we’re talking about the company, we’ll be referring to it as something else.

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