Atai Life Sciences Posts Earnings for Q1 2022, Advancing Key Milestones In Psychedelic Drug Development

Atai Life Sciences ATAI, a biotech company leading the development of psychedelic compounds for mental health purposes, issued its financial report for the first quarter of the year, ended March 31, 2022.

“We made great progress in the first quarter on our mission to achieve clinically meaningful behavioral change in people living with mental health disorders – seeing strong momentum across our three strategic pillars. We dosed the first subject in our Phase 1 KUR-101 trial and launched our fourth drug discovery program, Invyxis,” CEO Florian Brand said, who also highlighted the initiation of a usability study by Psyber, a portfolio company developing brain-computer interface technology in patients receiving ketamine treatment.

The Numbers

Atai continues to be one of the best-capitalized companies in the psychedelics space, with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at $335 million by the end of the quarter, compared to $362 million as of December 31, 2021. 

The company anticipates that this capital will provide a sufficient cash runway to cover this year and all of 2023.

As a biotech developing drugs for FDA approval, the company still has virtually no active revenue streams, thus it presented a net loss (attributable to shareholders) of $36.9 million for the quarter.

Atai is doubling down on its R&D efforts with spending on this front equalling  $15.5 million, as compared to $5.6 million for the same quarter last year. The same goes for general and administrative expenses, which totaled $18 million, nearly doubling the $9.3 million spent in the same period last year.

“The first quarter of 2022 continued with strong execution of our clinical pipeline. We anticipate several clinical milestones in 2022 and beyond, including data from the Phase 2 proof-of-concept study of PCN-101 as a potential at-home-use therapy in treatment-resistant depression,” said Srinivas Rao, Atai's chief scientific officer.

Photo by Vedrana Filipović on Unsplash.