"For psilocybin, LSD, MDMA — we're talking about 6 to 8 to 10 hours that a patient is sitting in a room. We landed upon a drug called 5-MeO-DMT. The experience is over within an hour. That would be a much more scalable treatment."
— Cosmo Feilding-Mellen
Cosmo Feilding-Mellen didn't discover psychedelics — he grew up around them. His mother, Amanda Feilding, has spent 25 years running the Beckley Foundation, one of the pioneering nonprofits behind the modern renaissance of psychedelic science. The family's dinner table conversation wasn't about what was happening at school. It was about what was happening in the brain.
That background gave Cosmo an unusual starting point: not a leap of imagination, but a question of contribution. How do you take decades of academic research and actually get it to patients? About eight or nine years ago, the answer became clear: build a pharmaceutical drug development company. That company became Beckley Psytech.
In this episode, Brandon Li sits down with Cosmo to explore Beckley Psytech's thesis — that the next generation of psychedelic medicines will be defined not just by efficacy, but by how scalable and accessible the treatment experience actually is.
Born Into the Science
Cosmo's entry into the field wasn't a dramatic revelation. It was inheritance. Growing up around figures now considered the godfathers of psychedelic science, he watched the field slowly snowball from a stigmatized outlier in the 1990s into the current moment of real regulatory and investor momentum.
His older brother rebelled by becoming a conservative politician. Cosmo took the other path.
"I'm really lucky that the timing for my life is when this area isn't nearly as stigmatized as it was for my mother. She was really kind of an outsider trying to drive this forward. For us there's now so much momentum from a regulatory perspective, from the general public perception of this field, and from investor interest."
When it became clear that commercializing psychedelic science required a different set of skills — and a different level of capital intensity — than running a nonprofit, Cosmo and his co-founders made the decision to build. Beckley Psytech launched with a deliberate ambition: to be an ethical beacon in a field at risk of being overwhelmed by hype.
The Scalability Hypothesis
The first generation of psychedelic medicines — psilocybin, LSD, MDMA — have produced genuinely encouraging clinical data. The challenge isn't efficacy. It's logistics.
These drugs produce experiences lasting 6 to 10 hours. Under current clinical protocols, a patient spends that entire time in a supervised room with one or two healthcare professionals. Multiply that across the millions of people with depression or addiction who could benefit, and the math doesn't work. Too many hours. Too many clinicians. Too expensive.
Beckley Psytech's central hypothesis was simple: what if the therapeutic effect doesn't require a long experience — only an intense one?
"It was the hypothesis that we set out to test: that it is not the duration of the acute experience that really matters. It's more the quality and intensity that's a kind of correlate of what's going on in the brain — the biomarker for neuroplastic changes."
That hypothesis pointed them toward 5-MeO-DMT — a compound naturally occurring in the Sonoran desert toad, distinct from DMT despite molecular similarities. The subjective experience it produces is markedly non-visual, extremely intense, and over in under an hour. If it could deliver comparable antidepressant effects to longer-acting drugs, it would represent a step-change in how scalable these treatments could be.
Why Treatment-Resistant Depression First
Choosing which patient population to target first wasn't arbitrary. It was a deliberate regulatory and commercial strategy.
Treatment-resistant depression patients — those who haven't responded to standard antidepressants — face the greatest unmet need. They also cost the most to healthcare systems, which means payers are more willing to reimburse new treatments. And regulators, assessing the risk-benefit ratio for novel compounds, are more likely to accept those compounds in patients who have run out of other options.
"The idea is that you start with the hardest-to-treat patients first, and then work your way down to open up the funnel as time goes on."
The reference point in the room was Spravato (esketamine) — Johnson & Johnson's ketamine analog, approved in 2019 for treatment-resistant depression. It proved that a novel psychoactive compound could clear regulatory hurdles and achieve reimbursement. Beckley Psytech's team, including Steve Wooding — former head of global commercial and market access strategy at Janssen — brought that institutional knowledge to bear on building the regulatory path for 5-MeO-DMT.
The Phase 2B Trial
Beckley Psytech's lead compound, BPL-003 (intranasal 5-MeO-DMT), has already generated encouraging open-label data. In a study of patients with treatment-resistant depression, more than half showed at least a 50% reduction in depressive symptoms on the MADRS scale within 24 hours of a single administration. That antidepressant effect held for three months.
"The data we're seeing so far suggests the efficacy is comparable to the longer-duration drugs like oral psilocybin. So far it looks like our hypothesis is correct — but there's a long way to go."
BPL-003 is now in a large Phase 2B trial: 30-plus sites across six countries including the US, Europe, and Australia. Three dose arms — a very low active placebo, a medium dose, and a high dose. The aim is to demonstrate a treatment effect between the high dose and the active placebo, with recruitment targeted for completion by end of year.
Alongside the primary trial, Beckley is running parallel work: optimizing dosing models, exploring two-dose induction protocols, and investigating whether these compounds can be safely administered alongside SSRIs — so patients don't need to wash off their existing medications first.
A Second Compound: ELE-101
Beckley Psytech isn't a single-compound bet. Their second program, ELE-101, is a stable intravenous form of psilocin — the active metabolite that oral psilocybin breaks down into in the body.
The logic mirrors the BPL-003 thesis. Oral psilocybin has extensive safety and efficacy data. But the experience lasts 6 to 8 hours. By delivering psilocin intravenously, Beckley can control pharmacokinetics more precisely, compress the time in clinic to one to two hours, and leverage all the existing evidence base — while delivering the treatment in a form that's more scalable.
"We've done a Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers, selected a dose, and we've now dosed a cohort of patients with major depressive disorder. Very excited to show that data publicly soon."
The two-compound portfolio — BPL-003 in treatment-resistant depression and alcohol use disorder, ELE-101 in MDD — is designed to hedge the pipeline while doubling down on the core hypothesis that shorter experiences can deliver comparable therapeutic outcomes.
Digital Companions as Amplifiers
One emerging area Cosmo flagged: digital therapeutics. The standard of care around psychedelic treatment involves not just the session itself, but preparation beforehand and integration afterwards. Both require time from healthcare professionals — adding to cost and limiting scale.
Digital tools could manage a significant portion of that support, freeing up clinician time for the in-session experience. But Cosmo sees a more interesting possibility: that the window of neuroplasticity opened by psychedelics might actually amplify the effectiveness of digital therapeutic interventions delivered during that window.
"What's interesting is the potential synergies between this class of compounds and digital therapeutics. If the psychedelic creates this window of neuroplasticity — an opportunity for the brain to form new patterns of thought and behavior — then digital therapeutics delivered during that window could potentially amplify the effectiveness of both."
What You'll Learn
- Why the duration of the psychedelic experience may be a scalability bottleneck — not a therapeutic requirement
- How Beckley Psytech chose treatment-resistant depression as their lead indication based on regulatory and reimbursement logic
- What BPL-003's open-label data shows about 5-MeO-DMT's antidepressant effects
- How ELE-101 (IV psilocin) compresses the psilocybin experience without sacrificing the evidence base
- Why digital companions could amplify — not just support — psychedelic treatments
Episode Highlights
- [0:58] Cosmo's background: growing up in the Beckley Foundation family
- [6:49] The decision to move from academic research to pharmaceutical drug development
- [11:34] On hype and ethical standards in the psychedelic industry
- [14:41] Triangulating compound, indication, and market access strategy
- [18:07] Why psilocybin's 6–10 hour duration is a scalability problem
- [19:35] Why Beckley chose 5-MeO-DMT
- [20:37] Why treatment-resistant depression is the right first target
- [24:58] The neuroplasticity hypothesis: intensity over duration
- [26:19] BPL-003 Phase 2B: 30+ sites, 6 countries, 3 doses
- [31:44] The pipeline: TRD, alcohol use disorder, ELE-101 in MDD
- [37:58] Digital companions and the neuroplasticity amplification thesis
