CaamTech Raises $22M With A Broad Portfolio Of Novel Psychedelic Drugs

CaaMTech, a drug discovery company in the psychedelics space, has closed a $22 million Series A financing round.

The company is focused on building a patent library of analytically pure, well-characterized psychedelic drugs for psychiatry and other health purposes.

“We have been screening hundreds of preclinical compounds in parallel and have now curated a collection of about a dozen clinical candidates that have desirable properties,” said CaamTech CEO Dr. Andrew Chadeayne in an interview with Benzinga.

The raise was led by Noetic, a group of venture funds focused on investing in emerging and early-stage psychedelic and neurology companies.

CaamTech’s Drug Development Pipeline

While a first wave of legacy psychedelics molecules is already advancing through the FDA clinical trial pipeline, much hope is placed on second-generation psychedelics that could offer improved therapeutic and commercial potential.

“We are very excited to have 'psychedelic' compounds that offer a wide spectrum of biological properties, suggesting that they could have value in different contexts. For example, we have compounds that can offer a broad range of onset times, durations of action, potencies, etc.,” Chadeayne said.

The company expects to have its first couple of drug products approved for Phase 1 trials by the end of 2022. These trials would be conducted internally, but CaamTech could consider partnering up with other entities to conduct more advanced indication-specific assays.

“We have a psilocin prodrug that's about twice as efficient compared to psilocybin. We also have a handful of very potent 5-HT2a agonists that don't appear to produce a 'psychedelic'

experience in the conventional biological assays,” Chadeayne, who holds academic titles in both chemistry and patent law, explained.

Building On Strong Foundations

Passing FDA clinical trials is often deemed the end goal for any new chemical entity in drug development. Chadeayne said his company has not yet chosen a first drug to submit for clinical trials, as it places a great deal of importance on having a strong basis for every molecule it plans to develop.

“We always begin with a fundamental characterization of each compound so that we know what we have before beginning downstream biological studies,” Chadeayne said, adding that an error in the fundamental characterization of the molecule results in errors at every subsequent step.

Sa’ad Shah, managing partner at Noetic, said CaamTech’s science-driven approach was one of the company’s traits that first caught the fund’s eye.

“We think that the approach that they're taking is very prudent. I think it's very well thought-out. And that's important in this industry right now, where you just find a lot of folks are rushing into things without giving it much thought and don't have all their I's dotted and the T's crossed,” Shah said.

CaamTech’s Approach: A Deep Moat Of Intellectual Property

Shah said this has been, by far, one of Noetic’s largest investments to date.

“We think that they're the most advanced and sophisticated IP company in the psychedelic space. And we certainly feel that they're poised to become one of the most valuable companies in the psychedelic space,” Shah said

With the proceeds of the funding, CaaMTech plans to expand its existing scientific collaborations and grow its internal development team.  

“So far we have focused largely on science—making and fully characterizing molecules and screening them for desirable properties in vitro and in vivo,” Chadeayne said. “Our major new focus at CaaMTech is building a development team and advancing several drugs into human trials.”

CaamTech has published tens of peer-reviewed scientific research publications and filed hundreds of patent applications for new chemical entities.

The company has collaborations with NIH’s Designer Drug Research Unit at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research in Germany.

“This whole IP discussion in this industry is very, very important. And it's going to play a bigger and bigger role going forward,” Shah added, concluding that CaamTech is “in a position of real strength with their ability to license out these compounds to the key players.”

Photo: Konstantin Kolosov at Pixabay.