Aren't places like the DMT nexus a threat to people who want to patent psychedelics? I know very little about patents, but i suppose that at least you should prove that your product is different from products already out there.
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...for MAPS’ global effort to succeed, even in its largely nonprofit terms, corporate players (and the shareholders behind them) are part of the team.

This is not a comfortable stance for those of us who believe that, as Nickles later put it, today’s dominant culture is not a reality to be accommodated, but an existential threat to be resisted. Along these lines, Geoff Bathje followed up Doblin’s presentation by repeating arguments against capitalism familiar to anyone who has been paying wide-screen attention to the political landscape in recent years. His strongest points concerned the way that psychedelic therapy, applied as “solutions” to individual psychological problems rather than broader social conditions, risks simply feeding into the self-improvement logic that increasingly underscores capitalist subjectivity, and that has already shown a remarkable capacity to absorb, defang, and redirect potentially transformative practices like yoga and mindfulness meditation. In this way, psychedelics may—and already are—contributing to the cancer that Bathje calls “elite perfectibility.”

With firebrand fervor, Nickles followed up on these sentiments, but with the passion of an Occupy veteran. He drew attention to the inequities and iniquities of late-stage capitalism, asking those of us who consider ourselves responsible for the shepherding of psychedelics into the larger world to consider what we are signing up for in making a pact with the medical model and the “respectability politics” that accompanies it. He also took pointed digs at some of MAPS’ more outrageous rightwing funders, like Rebecca Mercer, and argued that the fact that the notorious Peter Thiel has invested in Compass suggests, with apocalyptic clarity, that the mainstreaming of “psychedelic medicines” is already bound up with an authoritarian military-industrial-medical framework that does not have the world’s best interests at heart.

The legal wrangling over U.S. Patent No. 10,519,175 (the ’175 patent) began shortly after issuance. Kohn & Associates, PLLC filed a petition for Post Grant Review of the ’175 patent with the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on February 21, 2020 (Kohn & Associates, PLLC v. Compass Pathways Limited, Pet. for Post-Grant Review, PGR2020-00030, filed February 21, 2020). The petition identifies Kohn & Associates, PLLC as the real party in interest. The petitioner asserted that the claims in the ’175 patent are invalid and should never have been granted because they are obvious in view of articles in scientific literature that published before the priority date of the patent. Claim 1 of the ’175 patent reads:

A method of treating drug resistant depression comprising orally administering to a subject in need thereof a therapeutically effective amount of an oral dosage form, wherein, the oral dosage form comprises:

crystalline psilocybin in the form Polymorph A characterized by peaks in an XRPD diffractogram at 11.5, 12.0, 14.5, 17.5, and 19.7o2θ ± 0.1o2θ, wherein the crystalline psilocybin has a chemical purity of greater than 97% by HPLC, and no single impurity of greater than 1%; and silicified microcrystalline cellulose.

The PTAB has set a deadline of May 26, 2020 for the Patent Owner to file a preliminary response to the petition, but noted that the Patent Owner may elect to waive the preliminary response in order to expedite the proceedings. Under the USPTO rules, we can expect a decision by the PTAB to either institute the review process or reject the petition within six months. We know from the cannabis industry that the PTAB treats disputes relating to claims covering cannabis no differently than claims to any other technology. So, we can expect that whatever the PTAB decides, the Schedule I status of psilocybin is unlikely to factor into that decision.

Update: looks like COMPASS has successfully defended their patent and now filed an IPO request:

https://www.psymposia.co...ents-usona-open-science/

The patent application, filed in 2020, for “treatment of depression and other various disorders with psilocybin," includes claims involving rudimentary facets of psilocybin-assisted therapy like having "a room with a substantially non-clinical appearance.” Other claims found in the application: "the room comprises soft furniture,” “the room is decorated using muted colors,” “the room comprises a high-resolution sound system,” and “the room comprises a bed or a couch.

100. The method of claim 94, wherein the therapist counsels the subject to do one or more of the following: (1 ) to accept feelings of anxiety, (2) to allow the experience to unfold naturally, (3) to avoid psychologically resisting the experience, (4) to relax, and/or (5) to explore the subject’s own mental space.