What with the MAPS “therapy” disaster followed by the ABC (Australia) Mind Medicine expose and now this, all in all it has not been a good month for those that believe in the future of a regulated psychedelics environment. Apply $’s to psychedelics and all sorts of problems occur…..Me thinks our counterculture hereos of the 60’s and 70′ would be laughing their socks off.
This week’s drama comes courtesy of Terran Biosciences, which alleged in a lawsuit filed on the 5th August that Compass Pathways stole trade secrets from a University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) researcher Dr. Scott Thompson then filed patents claiming them.
Why does Terran care? Well, in 2021 the stealth biotech company inked an exclusive licensing deal for a suite of psychedelic-related patents and data from UMB. Thompson’s work was among it.
Thompson researches methods of antidepressant drug action, and depression itself, in his role as professor of physiology at UMB. According to the lawsuit filed by Terran, Thompson has been working on the “idea of co-administration of psilocybin with a 5-HT2A antagonist” since 2016. The purpose of this co-administration would be to tamp down or eliminate the hallucinogenic effects of a psychedelic (in this case psilocybin) while maintaining any therapeutic (in this case antidepressant) effects.
and then this…
Exclusive: Tweet from Compass Account Calls Terran “slime” and Lawsuit “Publicity ploy” — Compass Blames Hac
In the course of writing-up tthe above story we felt that even mentioning the possibility of a fishing expedition on Terran’s part was overly cynical.
That’s until a tweet steeped in even more cynicism came to our attention. The tweet was posted in response to a thread we wrote as the news broke, and read:
Publicity ploy for Terran. What slime
What surprised us was that the tweet was posted from Compass Pathways’ Twitter account (ownership of the account was confirmed to Psychedelic Alpha in writing).
We reached out to Compass, who told us that “COMPASS did not make this comment”. A representative from the company went on to tell us that they would “assume we have been hacked”.
The tweet was deleted within minutes of being posted.
