Hot off the Press: #1 Futurama - Psychedelics
Welcome to all of our new subscribers! We’re excited to announce the launch of our new series as part of The Venture Brief: Futurama. As many of you know, at The Venture Brief we are quite the content devourers and occasionally suffer from information FOMO. We also live and breathe technology and love to stay on top of the craziest ideas and breakthroughs in order to get an idea of how the future will look like. As a result, we recently asked ourselves: Where can one find comprehensive summaries on emerging industries and breakthrough technologies that matter - ahead of the curve? When we couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, we decided to create Futurama.
At Futurama, we dissect emerging industries and breakthrough technologies that solve meaningful problems and have the potential to change the way we live. In our monthly issue and bi-weekly podcast episodes, we crack down on common misconceptions and keep you ahead of the curve with a thoughtful analysis, compiled from +100 hours of market research and interviews with leading scientists, inventors, investors, and the most ambitious entrepreneurs. You can read more here.
The Shift of Psychedelics to Modern Medicine
An industry shunned by naysayers and skeptics, psychedelics have come a long way from being a medium to reach higher beings, to an effective drug therapy for patients suffering from mental health conditions. With manufacturers failing to keep up with the dramatic increase in demand for anti-depressants as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, the anti-depressant industry leapfrogged 2x in size from $14.3Bn in 2019 to about $28.6Bn in 2020 alone. In search of alternatives to fill up the gap in demand created by the pandemic, psychedelic medicine is beginning to shift into the mental health mainstream. While the pandemic acts as an inflection point in favor of the adoption of psychedelics, clinical research has exponentially increased over the past 4 years. Both regulators and startups are rushing to capitalize on this inflection point, reducing requirements for clinical tests and raising record amounts in capital respectively. Despite all of this, big pharma remains on the sideline. Although we are far from seeing psychedelics in the mainstream, its potential to fix a broken industry and halt the alarming rate at which mental health conditions increase across the global population begs us to ask ourselves: why haven’t I heard of this before?
In our first issue of Futurama, we explore the history of psychedelics, the sheer size of the anti-depressant industry, and the science behind different psychedelic substances. We further dig into selected front-runners and the opportunities that underlie the renaissance of psychedelics in modern medicine. Get the report and stay ahead of the curve!
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The future belongs to the curious,
Neal & Lukas