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Toad venom to treat depression? RA Capital wagers $125M on latest psychedelic biotech – Endpoints News

/ Depression / By

Can an in­haled ver­sion of the psy­che­del­ic known as ‘toad ven­om’ be used to treat tough-to-crack de­pres­sion? For GH Re­search, that’s the $125 mil­lion ques­tion.

The Dublin-based biotech an­nounced Mon­day it closed a Se­ries B round to help ad­vance its lead pro­gram, an in­halant called GH001, for psy­chi­atric and neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­or­ders. GH is be­gin­ning with treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion and has two as-yet-undis­closed in­di­ca­tions on tap.

Mon­day’s round was co-led RA Cap­i­tal and RTW In­vest­ments, along with ex­ist­ing in­vestor BVF Part­ners. End­points News has reached out to GH for com­ment and will pro­vide up­dates ap­pro­pri­ate­ly.

The drug in ques­tion is a sci­en­tif­ic mouth­ful — 5-Methoxy-N, N-di­methyl­trypt­a­mine is the of­fi­cial name — but is more com­mon­ly re­ferred to as 5-MeO-DMT or slangi­ly as toad ven­om, due to its pres­ence in a cer­tain toad species na­tive to the south­west­ern US and north­west­ern Mex­i­co. It can al­so be de­rived from plants or made syn­thet­i­cal­ly, with the plant ver­sion used as an en­theogen in some parts of Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca.

Per a 2018 VICE News re­port, the psy­che­del­ic saw a rapid rise in pop­u­lar­i­ty in the mid-2010s among those try­ing to achieve the ‘ego death’ phe­nom­e­non, in which re­searchers be­lieve the part of the brain re­spon­si­ble for one’s sense of self shuts down tem­porar­i­ly. The drug saw heavy in­ter­est from users on Red­dit and YouTube, VICE re­port­ed, who en­gaged in an “arms race” to boast about their ex­pe­ri­ences get­ting high.

Psy­che­delics-fo­cused biotechs have seen a surge in in­vestor in­ter­est in re­cent years, most no­tably sur­round­ing the Pe­ter Thiel-backed ATAI Life Sci­ences. That com­pa­ny us­es a unique busi­ness mod­el for de­vel­op­ing ther­a­peu­tics cov­er­ing a range of men­tal health dis­or­ders by bring­ing port­fo­lio com­pa­nies un­der one um­brel­la.

Though ATAI has more than 13 pro­grams de­vel­op­ing drugs, GH is much more nar­row­ly fo­cused on its 5-MeO-DMT work. So far, GH001 has com­plet­ed a Phase I study in healthy vol­un­teers, the com­pa­ny said. Re­sults showed GH001 was well-tol­er­at­ed, and it’s now in a Phase I/II tri­al in pa­tients with treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion.

The biotech is al­so work­ing on an in­jectable for­mu­la­tion of 5-MeO-DMT, which they are call­ing GH002 and for which they’re al­so keep­ing po­ten­tial in­di­ca­tions close to the vest.

Treat­ment-re­sis­tant de­pres­sion oc­curs in pa­tients who see lit­tle to no suc­cess with an­ti­de­pres­sants or psy­chother­a­py, ac­cord­ing to the Mayo Clin­ic. Symp­toms can range from mild to se­vere and there’s gen­er­al­ly not a sin­gle ap­proach that works for every pa­tient.

In ad­di­tion to RA Cap­i­tal and RTW In­vest­ments, oth­er new in­vestors in­clud­ed Acu­ta Cap­i­tal Part­ners, Box­er Cap­i­tal, Cor­morant As­set Man­age­ment, Deer­field Man­age­ment Com­pa­ny, Lo­gos Cap­i­tal, Sur­vey­or Cap­i­tal, Ven­rock Health­care Cap­i­tal Part­ners and Veri­tion Fund Man­age­ment.