Filament Health was founded by experts in botanical extraction and commercialization. We honed our expertise at Mazza Innovation, a natural extraction startup, which our team scaled from pre-seed to an exit in 2018. At Mazza, we developed and commercialized patent-protected extraction technologies at a 35,000 ft2 commercial-scale, GMP facility.
After selling Mazza, it became clear that our natural extraction expertise was needed in a new area. Ben Lightburn, Filament’s CEO and Co-Founder, took note of the growing global mental health crisis. He believed that psychedelics could help – they contain compounds like psilocybin which have shown promise for treating a range of health conditions. Ben also recognized that natural psychedelics would be consumers’ preferred choice which put him in a unique position: he had the skills and experience to develop natural psychedelic drugs. By combining Ben’s background as an entrepreneur with the botanical extraction expertise of the former
Mazza Innovation team, Filament Health was created.
WHY NATURAL PSYCHEDELICS?
We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. At Filament, we believe that naturally-derived psychedelic medicines can treat the millions of people suffering from mental health conditions worldwide.
Natural psychedelics have been developed by nature over millions of years. Nature – not a lab – is the best source for new psychedelic drug candidates, and there are hundreds of clinically unexplored psychedelic species, each containing multiple active compounds. Refining psychedelic plants and fungi into pharmaceutical-grade medicines is the best route to widespread adoption.
Furthermore, given the urgency of the mental health crisis, it is logical to use compounds that are already known, rather than synthesizing new molecules which could take years to be determined safe and efficacious. For example, psilocin, the active form of psilocybin found in magic mushrooms, has never been directly administered in a clinical trial – until now. As of 2022, Filament has begun the first ever FDA clinical trial of psilocin in partnership with the University of California San Francisco. The UCSF team is also studying our psilocybin drug candidate in the FDA’s first natural psychedelic clinical trial. All other FDA trials have used synthetic psychedelics whereas our drug candidates are extracted from the magic mushroom.
OUR TECHNOLOGY
Our team has developed a groundbreaking platform with the technology necessary to create drug candidates from natural psychedelic sources like magic mushrooms and ayahuasca. Filament’s drug development pathway is the best of both worlds – we leverage the benefits of classical, well-known substances while also providing robust IP protection. Our comprehensive platform offers the potential for hundreds of drugs to be discovered and run through our in-house development program or through our partnership network.
To date, the healing potential of natural psychedelic drugs has gone completely unexplored due to psychedelic prohibition and a lack of natural extraction expertise. Few understand how to extract and standardize natural psychedelics; much of what is published is incorrect.
Our technology allows us to produce stable, standardized formulations of any psychedelic species. Our innovations have yielded patented methods to produce the world’s first pharmaceutical-grade, natural psychedelic drug candidates.
