Will Van Derveer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Well, it's an interesting moment because as we've been talking about, Compass Pathways is ahead of the pack in terms of their trajectory toward the end of phase three with FDA.
And we all know that getting first to market is a huge advantage competitively, right?
On the other hand, and this is kind of an interesting irony to keep thinking about and looking into, is that psilocybin, whether it's synthetic or the plant-based one, as a product, as an intervention, is a relatively long experience for the patient and the service center, the clinic, to wrap their head around.
We're talking about a five or six hour experience.
So, you know, for a patient and for a clinic staffing set up, it's an all day experience essentially for the patient to get that intervention.
You compare that with some of the other products that are in the pipeline.
What comes to mind right off the bat is a young combat veteran that we treated in one of our studies.
That's the name I gave him in the book.
And I think he was 24 when I met him.
And he had done a tour in Iraq and had...
He had a condition that we see a lot in veterans called moral injury, where it's a very specific type of trauma where the roles of engagement, the roles of conduct in the combat theater are not followed.
And you bear witness to that.
You see your commanding officer doing things that are inhumane or could even be considered war crimes, for example.
And your psyche doesn't know what to do with that because you joined the armed forces for the reasons that most people do, which is because you care about your country and you are there to defend and protect something that you believe in that stands behind you.
Not because you have any desire to go out and kill people, right?
But when children are carrying IEDs or luring soldiers into situations and children get killed, there can be a lasting traumatic impact from that.
And the sort of nature of moral injury is that you can develop a view that