Episode Transcript
Host: You're listening to the Levy Inspiration Grant Program podcast, where we share stories of business students following their entrepreneurial passions to every corner of the world. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Through the program, students at the Kellogg School of Management can travel to any country of their choosing to immerse themselves in a particular topic with an eye toward building a business around it. When they return, they sit down with me to reflect on the experience and share what they learned along the way.
[00:00:35] Host: When you hear about psychedelic drugs like LSD or mushrooms in pop culture, you might picture things like groovy, colorful shapes, maybe Woodstock, or just a general 1960s and 70s vibe. But thanks to new medical research, it may be time to rethink what you think you thought about psychedelics.
[00:00:56] Host: The U. S. Drug Enforcement Agency still classifies psilocybin, the more scientific name for mushrooms, as a Schedule I substance, the strictest category of substances that are labeled as having "no currently accepted medical use." But some recent clinical studies dispute that claim. In fact, psychedelic-assisted therapy, in which patients go through a guided psychedelic experience with a mental health professional, has proven to not only have medical uses, but has shown broader efficacy with certain mental health conditions, unlocking a new and more effective treatment for patients who were previously falling through the cracks. While these substances have a long history of use in indigenous and spiritual practices, officially recognized scientific and medical use is just starting to come back around.
[00:01:47] Host: One country leading the way on this front is Australia, who updated their own drug classifications in 2023 and now allow authorized psychiatrists to prescribe psychedelics, like psilocybin, for the treatment of PTSD and treatment-resistant depression. Although this is still a narrow use-case, doctors are now beginning to prescribe these treatments outside of clinical trials, opening up a new slate of questions in a budding industry.
[00:02:12] Host: Christina Kappil and Jim Brazeal already had a deep interest in psychedelic-assisted therapies, and this change in Australia gave them a new opportunity to get a close-up view of how the industry is beginning to build itself. Over Winter Break, they took a trip there to see how doctors, clinics, and other professionals were putting together each of the complex pieces, from the overall business model, down to the scheduling logistics and more, all driving toward the mission of helping more patients get access to these groundbreaking and life-saving treatments.
Host: This is their Inspiration Grant story.
[00:02:58] Christina: My foray into the psychedelic-assisted therapy space really started from my passion for mental health and kind of almost obsession with trying to understand better treatments that stems from my own family being severely impacted by the detriments of the current lack of effective mental health treatments in this country.
[00:03:16] Christina: In 2019, my younger brother, Daniel, passed away to suicide, and that really impacted my family and I wanted to dedicate my career and personal and professional passions for helping people not go through the kind of pain that my brother went through and that my family went through. Specifically, he had gone through a lot of different types of mental health treatments, whether it was SSRIs, psychotherapy, even more invasive types of therapies, including ECT treatments. None of it really worked for him.
[00:03:49] Christina: When I got to Kellogg, I started exploring the mental health innovation space a little bit more started to see a lot of research coming up on psychedelic-assisted therapy with compounds like psilocybin and MDMA helping patients where treatment had not originally helped them before, and I got really excited about that.
[00:04:07] Christina: My foray into psychedelic-assisted therapy kind of started from a care delivery standpoint. So I've spent the last four and a half years prior to Kellogg working for a value-based care preventative healthcare provider in kind of a strategic role.
[00:04:23] Jim: And the focus there has really been on transitioning to care delivery systems that prevent downstream complications and impacts from health disorders. My family also has had some struggles with mental health disorders, specifically depression. It's pretty prevalent with my family. I got involved in the space because I was looking for care delivery mechanisms that were preventative for mental health care.
[00:04:46] Jim: I was actually in a relationship with someone who had introduced me to the idea of microdosing, and I'd had a pretty strong aversion to that because of some struggles that my family has had with substance abuse. But when we were parting ways, she gave me the book, How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. After kind of doing some reading there and digging into the subject a little bit more deeply, I found that this was a, a care delivery mechanism that showed a lot of promise for treating rather than just caring for mental health care issues.
[00:05:12] Christina: I decided that my time at Kellogg was a time where I wanted to take a risk, from that experience and exposure from the Business of Psychedelic Therapies event at Kellogg, I got connected with a startup in the psychedelic-assisted therapy space and decided that I wanted to spend my summer interning for them, supporting them in a strategy and product perspective.
[00:05:32] Christina: I spent my summer at their clinic and started helping them put together their business model, helping them understand how they wanted to set up their clinic and their operations around that, and got really excited because I realized that this is still such an emerging area and I think a lot of opportunity to make an impact in, so I wanted to put myself in that.
[00:05:51] Jim: To Christina's point, this is a really new field and one of the things that we experienced through the Levy Inspiration Grant was that there's a lot of opportunity for shaping and molding how the industry looks going forward.
[00:06:02] Jim: I think that my decision to get more involved in this from a business perspective actually came from a more competitive side of things. I like to play the contrarian in a lot of family discussions and as I was sharing the information that I had been learning about psychedelic-assisted therapy as a, a different care medium that proved more efficacious, I was getting a lot of pushback.
[00:06:21] Jim: I think a lot of it rooted in some of the stigma that is kind of around psychedelics in general, and I more wanted to prove them wrong and show that this was an opportunity to not only provide better care, but that there were business elements at play here that we could really play a part in shaping.
[00:06:36] Jim: Going into this experience, I had a little bit less direct involvement in the industry side of things. It was more of a, " here are some thoughts that I want to tease out" before really diving into it, full bore. And I think that the beautiful thing about what the Levy Inspiration Grant provides is that there's exposure to see in this new burgeoning industry where the proof points are and where the failure points are, and it was really cool to get to explore that.
[00:06:58] Jim: I think one of the things that psychedelic-assisted therapy unlocks that's a little bit new relative to traditional forms of therapy, is that it introduces an element of neuroplasticity that allows the individual to kind of take on their own approach to their therapy treatment.
[00:07:17] Jim: So, traditional forms of therapy are more focused on a interaction with a therapist helping you to break down barriers or explore thoughts that maybe you hadn't explored before.
[00:07:27] Jim: Psychedelic-assisted therapy is more geared towards preparation sessions that allow you to think about what you're going to be exploring yourself, and then during the dosage it's a lot more about your own individual exploration. And so by dosage, I mean there's a, about an eight-hour hallucinogenic experience in which you're heavily involved in kind of exploring your own thoughts and feelings rather than having that back and forth communication with a therapist as much. And I think that what that enables is just a different perspective that may be difficult to reach, that takes a different form than with traditional therapy.
[00:07:59] Christina: To add to that, after you go through that experience, your therapist and you have what is called integration sessions, where you talk with your therapist about what you experienced in that dosing session and understand how you take those insights with you moving forward.
[00:08:13] Christina: And that's a really great way to understand, like, "okay, you had this, eight hour experience, but how do you actually integrate that into your life in a way that lasts for a long time?" Whether that's relating it back to maybe traumas that you weren't able to face before, or certain perspectives on life that might impact depressive symptoms that you're feeling.
[00:08:32] Christina: There's a lot of different applications and there's even applications for potentially like addiction or even other mental health indications that there's still research being explored on.
[00:08:39] Host: You look at a lot of treatments like SSRIs, for example, where there are a lot of people where it does work for, and there's a lot of people that were taking them where it wasn't effective and they tried a lot of different treatments and still could not find things that worked for them.
[00:08:51] Christina: And you're seeing now with the psychedelic-assisted therapies, that cohort of people where things didn't work for before are now showing effectiveness. And so clearly there's something here that is unique and new.
[00:09:02] Jim: One consensus amongst members of the industry and players in the field is that this is an efficacious treatment. It's unique in that SSRIs were described to us as a pain management technique for mental healthcare, whereas psychedelic-assisted therapy is a more surgical approach that's focused on treating issues long term. That said, there's a lot of research that's still to be done.
[00:09:21] Host: Turning our attention back to their Levy Inspiration Grant experience, Christina and Jim shared why they decided to explore this subject in Australia, and what they hope to learn there.
[00:09:34] Jim: The place that we decided on for traveling to learn about psychedelic-assisted therapy was broadly Australia. The reason being that in Australia, as of July 1st, the TGA, which is the Therapeutic Goods Administration, made it legal for certain psychiatrists to prescribe psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression and MDMA for PTSD.
[00:09:56] Jim: And that was a first in the world in so much as psychiatrists had legal access to prescribing these drugs, which were now downgraded from a Schedule Nine, which is federally illegal, to Schedule Eight, which is "under certain circumstances."
[00:10:07] Jim: That's not recreational, which I think is an important other thing for us to bring up here. We're speaking about this in terms of medicine and in terms of mental healthcare, not in terms of recreational hallucinogenic use, which I think a lot of people immediately gravitate towards in the United States whenever we have conversations like this. And within our trip to Australia, we ended up visiting three places along the east coast, and then one along the west coast.
[00:10:30] Jim: But largely it was built around where some of the academic research was being performed as well as where some of the care delivery organizations that were starting to crop up were budding. A lot of the care delivery organizations were focused on Western Australia, a lot of the researchers that we were interacting with were primarily concentrated in Eastern Australia.
Jim: That's really why we were focused on those two geographies.
[00:10:50] Christina: From my perspective, having worked at a psychedelic-assisted therapy clinic over the summer, I was curious to see like, how are other businesses, especially in Australia, where prescribers actually have access to this outside of a clinical trial, how are they setting up their clinics in terms of like staffing models, marketing strategies and positioning to patients and other providers?
[00:11:11] Jim: One of the things that I think is interesting about our particular involvement with the Levy Inspiration Grant is that we were not only excited to partake in this as a function of being interested in the business dynamics of it, but also we have a vested interest in the fact that we're running the Kellogg Business of Psychedelics Conference.
[00:11:27] Jim: And I think one of the things that we're focusing on for that is the foundational infrastructure that's necessary to support an industry it's more efficacious than traditional therapeutic alternatives. what we're really trying to figure out is: we know that this is an effective treatment, how do we make sure that people can have access to it? By access, we mean, to Christina's point, that therapists are able to get trained in this in a kind of standard operating way. How do we think about bringing back to the United States some of the legislative techniques that Australia used to get this legislation passed?
[00:11:55] Jim: How do we think about the fact that this is a very expensive treatment, and one of the prohibitive factors of people having access is cost. How are individuals in Australia thinking about that? There were a number of dynamics that weren't necessarily specific to the actual dosage of psychedelic-assisted therapy that affect whether people are going to be able to ever have access to this treatment.
[00:12:15] Jim: And we wanted to figure out how, now that this legislation has passed, how the industry's thinking about building up those elements to support it.
[00:12:21] Christina: There were a lot of moments where we had a lot of like aha moments, I think. But to me, one of the biggest takeaways was: we walked in with a lot of questions expecting that there would be clear-cut answers, and I think Jim would agree with me that everyone we talked to for any one opinion that was stated, we talked to another person who felt the complete opposite. It seemed like we actually ended up coming out with more questions than answers, but in a good way because I think it means that people have different views on what's the best way to do it.
[00:12:56] Christina: We got a lot of different perspectives, and I think time will tell like what actually will play out, and it, it doesn't have to be a black and white. It could be, maybe both of them could be right in the same way.
[00:13:06] Christina: One of the elements was people debating on who is actually gonna pay for this therapy. That was a big question we had coming out, 'cause I know that's important in the United States healthcare system as well as the reimbursement.
[00:13:16] Christina: We talked to experts who felt that they were not super optimistic that this would be adopted by the public health insurance system in Australia, but that potentially there could be organizations like the Department of Veteran Affairs, the DVA, that might be willing to fund this, or even private insurers who might be willing to fund this.
[00:13:36] Christina: All of that would require a lot of data and health economics studies, and that's gonna take a few years at least to get that data to come out. For the time being, I think everyone's agreed that this is gonna be something where patients are gonna have to pay out of pocket for, and these therapies could cost as much as $20,000.
[00:13:52] Christina: And so this is not something that's super cheap, but the crazy part is there is such a big market for it. The clinics that we've talked to already have a waitlist of patients that have signed up because they're so desperate to get this type of treatment for their mental health conditions, which I think says a lot about the system, but also that the promise that these therapies could potentially be effective for them. There's also been talk about medical tourism where, because Australia does have this offered in a medicalized model, there's people from other countries like China, for example, who are willing to fly into Australia and actually pay out of pocket as well.
[00:14:23] Christina: So even though there isn't a clear path for reimbursement from the health insurance companies yet, there still seems to be a really big patient population that is willing to pay for it. But, in order to get that broader access for patients that need it, who can't afford to, you know, shell out $20,000, they're gonna have to get that data and they're gonna have to get buy-in from insurers and from the government to want to actually support this.
[00:14:46] Jim: I think one of the things that was most surprising to me coming in was that based on my understanding of how the US thinks about psychedelic-assisted therapy and psychedelics in general, I assumed that there would be a kind of internal tension between business players coming into an industry and the traditional kind of seventies, late sixties stigma around psychedelics. And what we found was that there was really a genuine interest in the mental healthcare aspect of this, it was just about how that care was delivered.
[00:15:14] Jim: Figuring out how to make this part of a broader ecosystem rather than just a point solution, and thinking about how to consider the Aboriginal roots that this medicine comes from, I think was important not only to people who have had these experiences in places like Peru that want to maintain kind of the indigenous considerations that are involved with this therapy. But also to a lot of the business players that we spoke with, who we assumed we're just looking at this from a standpoint of "how do I stand up an effective business model and profit from it?" were also considering, "hey, how are we still true to the medicine in the sense that, the Aboriginal tribes that exposed us to this, how do we keep those considerations part of our care delivery ecosystem?"
[00:15:50] Christina: I walked into this with the assumption that psychedelic assistive therapy is almost like a point solution, and in reality it's not, it should be part of a broader health system. And when we were in Australia, the clinics that we talked to, strongly felt that patients are coming to them to get treated for their complex mental health conditions, they weren't coming here to take psychedelics, right? And so they wanted their clinics to offer a broader range of things, whether it's trauma-informed psychotherapists, whether it's psychedelic-assisted therapy, whether it's TMS, which is another type of treatment.
[00:16:21] Christina: They wanted to have a broad range of offerings and make sure that the patient was not bouncing around from one clinic to another. Instead, being like, "okay, if this treatment doesn't work for you, let's take you within our clinic to another treatment option," and, and making sure that that handoff is really smooth because it's all within their clinic.
[00:16:38] Christina: I loved that model and I think that's not something I've seen in the US yet, and that's a model that I'd love to see tested in the US as well.
[00:16:45] Jim: I think one of the things that really stood out to me that needs to be brought back is this focus on how we can make this an adaptable model so that we're not just focusing on psychedelic-assisted therapy being a cure all, or something that we don't have to consider cost.
[00:16:59] Jim: I think that one of the things that a lot of the players that we talked to were thinking through most was not actually the mechanism that psychiatrists were going to be working with patients with, it was the external factors like logistics of how they would have a room be used or how they could lower the cost of care so that it was a solution that people could actually afford.
[00:17:16] Jim: And there's a spectrum there between the highest quality, most considering of a therapist's mental capacity to treat a patient as well, thinking about the fact that these treatments were traditionally done in an Aboriginal setting and being conscientious of that, and also the idea that SSRIs in Australia were somewhere between $5 and $8.
[00:17:36] Jim: So to be able to just continuously manage a person's mental health was a much more affordable option. And I think that finding that in-between was a point that a lot of the providers were thinking about every day, and is something that I'm certainly gonna be thinking about a lot bringing this back to the United States and thinking about future business endeavors. It's not just about how do we deliver the highest quality care, but how do we do so in a cost-effective manner?
[00:17:57] Jim: So one of the things that I just didn't expect going in was that patients that were going to be taking on or doing a psychedelic-assisted therapy session, a dosage, I thought of it as strictly an eight-hour time block, and so we were working with logistics around that eight-hour time block. Instead, it turns out that patients need to be in the same room the day before a dosing for their preparation session, and a day after the dosing for it to be an effective care mechanism in certain scenarios. This is what we were hearing anecdotally.
[00:18:27] Jim: That still needs to be tested and validated, but what that does is it, it inserts a number of barriers or just extra obstacles to delivering effective care to multiple patients within a week, and that increases the cost of care. One of the considerations that I just had not even thought about was the fact that the scheduling is a huge a problem for making this care more cost-effective.
[00:18:48] Jim: One of the other aspects of that I found interesting was that there's a, a model for how they construct these care delivery centers that optimizes for that, while also making sure that every patient has their own private setting or feels that they have their own private setting for receiving this treatment.
[00:19:01] Jim: And I think that one of the most difficult things that these companies are dealing with is, how do they deal with disruptions to the system that, again, we would never consider things like the therapist being sick or a patient getting stuck in traffic. These are eight-hour dosages as opposed to a one-hour conversation with a therapist that can easily be rescheduled to the next day.
[00:19:17] Jim: If I, as a patient, can't make it in to a treatment because I have a family emergency come up, that therapist, who had just blocked off eight hours of their day, is forgoing eight different opportunities to engage with other patients. So there are a number of, kind of hidden obstacles embedded within the psychedelic-assisted therapy care delivery system, that I think have to be considered and, and thought through really intentionally before this is gonna be something that is broadly available.
[00:19:40] Christina: Yeah. And to add to that, that exact scheduling complexity piece, that was something I was really curious about to see like, are there digital health solutions in place that help manage that? And from the clinics that we've talked to yet, they're still treating such a low number of patients, they haven't really scaled yet and they're still trying to figure out, what is it like to treat one patient to like five patients, to 10 patients? They haven't gotten to the point of let's figure out a digital solution, because you don't wanna invest a lot of money in creating something digital before you understand just the basic building blocks of it.
[00:20:08] Christina: It seems like there's still in the early phases and haven't gotten to a lot of automation yet in, managing a lot of that scheduling complexity that comes with psychedelic-assisted therapy. So I think that was something interesting to me as well sincewe're kind of in a similar place in the United States as well.
[00:20:22] Jim: One other thing that I'd just like to add is that I went into this thinking that there was kind of one conventional way of administering psychedelic-assisted therapy, and that was to have preparation sessions with the therapist to think about what you were going to be focusing on during your dosage session, there was the dosage session itself, which is an eight-hour treatment that you're undergoing this experience with two therapists present in the room. And then there was an integration session where you would work through what you had processed during the dosage.
[00:20:46] Jim: What we came to find was that there was a lot of disagreement around the most effective methods of administering care, even amongst similar players within the industry in Australia. And so much as one might focus on group therapy as a mechanism for unlocking opportunities for people that were in relationships to better understand each other and work through trauma together, versus going through this individually.
[00:21:06] Jim: I just think that there were a lot more flavors to what the actual experience looked like itself than I had originally understood going in.
[00:21:11] Host: Jim and Christina have clearly done their fair share of research and built up a pretty deep bench of knowledge on psychedelic-assisted therapy -assisted therapy but there's something to be said about being there talking to people face to face, and seeing the clinics for themselves that is just not the same as searching from a laptop.
[00:21:33] Christina: I think being in-person, you get to build a relationship with some of these players that are working in the industry and they're a lot more open with sharing with you like some of the challenges that they're facing how they feel about like competitive dynamics.
[00:21:48] Christina: This industry is so new and nascent that things are moving pretty fast now, to a point where you can't just Google like "what's the current state of the psychedelic industry in Australia" and, and know what's actually up to date. One of the examples was, we were talking to clinics and we learned that there's, at least at the time that we were in Australia, there was only two authorized prescribers for psychedelic-assisted therapy at that time, since they were still ramping up that approval process, and one of the clinicians that we were talking to was potentially gonna be the third.
[00:22:16] Christina: That approval could have happened at any point even while we were on that trip, and so once that approval happened, they were able to then kickstart a lot of other things to set up their business and their clinic. That is not something you can easily find online and, and understanding the nuances and challenges of: what is it like to set up a clinic, what is it like to train therapists? What is it like to be a manager of these clinics and be a leader and be a CEO of a clinic? Understanding those nuances is really difficult from just like Googling or reading research articles, for example.
[00:22:44] Jim: A second thing that I think was really impactful was being able to see the clinic setups. We went into one of the centers that had a traditional psychiatry setup, and we were actually able to look at one of the rooms and talk through how it would be re-orchestrated to make it so that it would be more amenable to a psychedelic-assisted therapy session. They were talking about how they were setting up flowers, how they were soundproofing the rooms.
[00:23:06] Jim: One of the big elements that's really difficult about psychedelic-assisted therapy is that there's oftentimes influence from your external environment that can really affect how you undergo the dosage session. And so sound, if you're having multiple psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions going on at the same time, can have a dramatic impact on what the actual outcome of that session looks like. So soundproofing rooms to where you can't hear what's going on another room, but it still feels like an organic environment, is something that's a unique engineering aspect that I would never have thought to ask about had we not seen this firsthand.
[00:23:35] Christina: Yeah. Even adding to that too, like, the physical experience that patients have when they're in that room, another element is music. What kind of music are they playing and is it just a generic playlist, or are they customizing that playlist to the patient and to their specific experiences?
[00:23:51] Christina: And one of the things we talked about too is, if they keep the same exact playlist every single time, the therapist who's probably doing these sessions over and over with other patients are gonna probably go crazy because they're, they're having to hear the same music over and over as well. Not only thinking about the patient experience and what that physical experience feels like, but also the experience for the therapist and even the layout of the room, where the furniture is, what type of furniture are they using, is it, you know, like a softer couch or bed for the patient to lay down in? How is the clinic laid out for the staff to work through and making sure that the rooms are not too close together so that there's no sound overlap, so patients are not hearing other patients. I think that element is, to Jim's point, something you only get if you're in-person, boots on the ground.
[00:24:34] Jim: Psychedelic-assisted therapy is something where customer-centered design, with the customer being the patient at the end of the supply chain, is much more critical to the success and the outcomes for those patients, than traditional therapy, than really almost any consumer product that I can think of.
[00:24:48] Jim: Even if we're thinking about like a Facebook or an Instagram where a lot of the UI is what dictates whether people spend additional time on the platform. It seems like with psychedelic-assisted therapy, you can have one small thing that goes wrong that somebody didn't think through about a design element of the room and the environment that cancreate totally different outcomes for the patient.
[00:25:07] Jim: It's like a managed sense of lack of control too, because these patients really have to go through an experience that's unique to them, it's not the same treatment as traditional therapy where there's standardized questions that you ask, if a person responds in this way, then you ask them this question to further dive into that.
[00:25:24] Jim: It's something where the patient is really going through their own unique experience, and you understand how to manage the environment so that it can be a positive experience for them. Positive doesn't necessarily mean happy. They can be embracing trauma that's been deeply rooted and long-standing that they frankly sometimes didn't even know existed.
[00:25:39] Jim: But that's the success of the infrastructure build and creating the right environment for that to happen.
[00:25:43] Christina: We got this really great opportunity to visit two different drug discovery labs where we got to see scientists actually working on creating derivatives of MDMA, psilocybin, and even other psychedelic-like compounds, where they were actually doing research to modify some of these compounds so that they could potentially reduce the duration of the trip.
[00:26:05] Christina: So maybe instead of having a trip for eight hours, maybe it's two hours, or maybe three hours, or maybe you don't even have a hallucinogenic trip at all. And now there's debate on whether or not that's actually effective and maybe the patient needs to go through that psychedelic experience or maybe they don't.
[00:26:21] Christina: The research is not there yet on what's the right way to do it, but there are drug discovery efforts on both ends trying to create these compounds. And then there's other indications as well, they're looking at modifying psychedelic compounds so that they are effective for other neurological disorders like Parkinson's disease, or Alzheimer's, for example.
[00:26:40] Christina: And so I think the applications go broader than just mental health, and I think that was a really great opportunity to see that this is just the beginning of what these applications could be, and there's just a lot of different philosophies on what type of drug or what type of experiences that these drugs are engineered to create for people, what's the most effective for treating certain conditions? And so that was really exciting to be able to see those labs.
[00:27:03] Host: Now for the big question. Since they've gotten a chance to peek into the Australian landscape for psychedelic-assisted therapies, what's next for Jim and Christina? Given the restrictions still in place in the United States, it isn't exactly a straight path, but they have some distinct plans to move forward on their entrepreneurial journeys.
[00:27:25] Christina: I think for me, I'm very passionate about the mental health space and coming into Kellogg, I knew I wanted to dive deeper into the mental health innovation and startup scene, and so I'd like to continue down that path.
[00:27:38] Christina: Having learned about the models that they're testing in Australia, I'd love to bring that back and inform some of the models that we're testing in the United States. I think everyone we've talked to in Australia wants to continue that relationship and create this sense of collaboration and community.
[00:27:54] Christina: As we're learning in the United States, and we're obviously at a different pace in terms of our regulatory landscape, but as we start learning things, as they start learning things, I think that conversation's gonna continue to happen, and hopefully we can all figure out the best model, to Jim's point, that's both cost-effective and beneficial for the patients and go forward that way.
[00:28:12] Christina: But, at this point, you know, there's still a lot up in the air, so I think that continued relationship and network is gonna be really valuable.
[00:28:17] Jim: There's a lot of elements that are coming together for me between going to school at Kellogg and having the opportunity to embark on this Levy Inspiration Grant.
[00:28:26] Jim: I think one of them is that while there is a lot of difference in how people within the industry in Australia view how care should be delivered, there's definitely consensus that there are inefficiencies with how the work streams fit together and the supply chain works. That I think provides a really cool perspective coming back to the United States that we focused a lot on, is this an efficacious treatment and how do we prove that it's efficacious? I don't feel that there's been enough talk about how we do this in a logistically-efficient manner that makes it so that it's affordable to as many people as possible. Whereas I went into this thinking, " Hey, I'm gonna focus on the care delivery aspect and how we make this something that is a better treatment for mental health disorders than our traditional mechanisms," I think that I'm looking more at the foundational elements and the operation side of things with thinking about how big of a role cost actually plays and whether patients have access to this treatment, and reconsidering getting involved in the supply chain side of things rather than in the direct care delivery aspects.
[00:29:24] Christina: One of the things we'd love to take this knowledge forward with is for the Business of Psychedelic Therapies Conference, which is happening in May. I think this really informs some of the topics that we wanna be talking about.
[00:29:36] Christina: And that's really the focus of the conference too, is how we build the infrastructure that makes it so that when this does become a viable treatment alternative, and it's in this testing phase, that we can equip those providers to have successful journeys so that then we can make sure that
[00:29:48] Jim: when we're administering this treatment, I say we broadly, that that's effective, and that we're able to actually like take those results and continue building and moving forward rather than pushing it too far, too fast.
[00:30:01] Christina: The message that I'd love the audience to consider with respect to psychedelic-assisted therapy is that it's not what your parents taught you to believe.
[00:30:08] Jim: There's a large focus on the hallucinogenic and recreational aspects of psychedelics, and that has its own space that can be a conversation for a different time, but what we're really focused on is mental healthcare and how we can provide more effective treatment to patients. This is, by far and away, one of the most efficacious drugs that we've seen in terms of assisting in treating mental health disorders.
[00:30:28] Jim: And so trying to view it through that scope as a care delivery mechanism and as a piece of the mental health care puzzle rather than as a drug, I think is incredibly important.
[00:30:36] Host: That's a wrap for this episode of the Levy Inspiration Grant Program podcast. If you'd like to join us for the 2024 Business of Psychedelic Therapies Conference, hosted by Kellogg in downtown Chicago on Saturday, May 18th, you can find the registration link in the show notes for this episode.
[00:31:02] Host: The Levy Inspiration Grant program is made possible through the generous support of Larry and Carol Levy and is managed by the Entrepreneurship Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. To learn more about the Levy Inspiration Grant Program, and other ways we support student entrepreneurs, visit our website at kell.gg/entrepreneurship. That's kell.gg/entrepreneurship. I'm your host, Tyler Seybold. Thanks for listening.
