From Finance To Psychology, Shlomi Raz, CEO Of Eleusis: Meet Our Speakers

CEO and founder of psychedelics company Eleusis, Shlomi Raz has extensive experience in managing companies.

With a BS in Finance and a later an MA in Psychology, Raz became a vice president at JP Morgan JPM and managing director at Goldman Sachs GS. In 2013, he founded Eleusis ELEU, which he still manages today, after the merger with the Silver Spike Acquisition Corp. II SPKB.

In June 2020, when Eleusis was still a private company, Raz took part in a Psyched Studio-hosted conference, where he talked about the difficulties psychedelics currently encounter in becoming viable therapeutic options.

Raz oversees the company’s corporate and clinical development efforts demonstrating that he is knowledgeable of the clinical realities of the market as well as the problems that may arise from underdeveloped premises where therapies and therapists might be undertrained.

These insights are born from Raz’s academic pursuits and deep understanding of psychological treatments. Even though he has a background in finance, in 2008 he decided to pursue a lifelong interest in psychology. “I enrolled in a graduate program at NYU with the intention of becoming a psychotherapist. There I came across research out of Johns Hopkins on the profound psychiatric impacts of psychedelic drugs,” he told Forbes.

He then found out that psychedelics could offer a broad range of possibilities, including a viable treatment against Alzheimer’s disease, given that a novel development pipeline was created.

“Most biotechnology companies try to develop a drug that hits a single target and nothing else. But Alzheimer's is a complex disease with multiple therapeutic targets, and as single-target approaches continue to fail, there is a growing and widespread belief that a successful therapeutic approach will have to hit multiple targets simultaneously,” he said in the same interview.

With that in mind, Eleusis was created. In 2015 the first clinical trials began to explore the hypothesis that low doses of LSD could have some positive effects in patients, but without giving rise to psychoactivity.

Eleusis’ primary goal, as explained by Raz in an article, is to develop products that make use of psychedelics’ anti-inflammatory properties, as a way of combating diseases like asthma, atherosclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and retinal disease.

This year, at the upcoming Benzinga Psychedelics Capital Conference, to be held on April 19 at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach Hotel in Florida, Shlomi Raz will share his vision and valuable insights about the burgeoning psychedelics sector.