One line in an aca­d­e­m­ic pa­per changed every­thing for David Ol­son.

It was 2018 when Ol­son’s lab at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Davis pub­lished a pa­per demon­strat­ing psy­che­delics’ abil­i­ty to pro­mote neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty. Psy­che­delics re­search has slow­ly emerged from the shad­ows in the last cou­ple decades, with the FDA ap­prov­ing the first psy­che­del­ic drug, es­ke­t­a­mine, to treat de­pres­sion in 2019. A hand­ful of com­pa­nies are now test­ing the ef­fects of oth­er com­pounds like psilo­cy­bin — the psy­choac­tive in­gre­di­ent in mag­ic mush­rooms — on a suite of men­tal health dis­or­ders.

In the pa­per, Ol­son wrote “one lit­tle line” about his lab’s work on nov­el analogs of psy­che­delics that could have sim­i­lar ther­a­peu­tic ben­e­fits, but were non-hal­lu­cino­genic.

“One of our co-founders, Nick Haft at OMX Ven­tures, he read that line and he con­tact­ed me right away,” Ol­son said. “It was a time when I was look­ing for a busi­ness part­ner, I was look­ing for some­one to bring this com­pa­ny to­geth­er.”

In 2019, they launched Delix Ther­a­peu­tics, tap­ping Shire neu­ro­science vet Mark Rus to guide the Boston-based biotech in­to the clin­ic. And on Mon­day, they un­veiled a $70 mil­lion Se­ries A round led by AR­TIS Ven­tures, RA Cap­i­tal Man­age­ment and OMX.

“It’s a group that’s all re­al­ly ex­cit­ed by the new hope that psy­che­del­ic and psy­choplas­to­gen ef­fi­ca­cy and ear­ly da­ta and emerg­ing da­ta has promised,” Rus, CEO, told End­points News.

Ol­son’s lab coined the term “psy­choplas­to­gen” to de­scribe small mol­e­cules that pro­duce rapid and long-last­ing psy­che­del­ic- and ke­t­a­mine-like ef­fects on neu­ronal struc­ture. Their non-hal­lu­cino­genic psy­choplas­to­gens pro­duced “sus­tained ther­a­peu­tic ef­fects” in pre­clin­i­cal mod­els, ac­cord­ing to Delix, and their first two can­di­dates are slat­ed to en­ter the clin­ic in 2022.

While Rus hasn’t re­vealed which in­di­ca­tions Delix is tar­get­ing first, he said the com­pa­ny is look­ing to go af­ter a large swath of men­tal health dis­or­ders, all of which have one thing in com­mon: some­thing called cor­ti­cal at­ro­phy.

If you think of neu­rons as trees in a part of the brain called the pre­frontal cor­tex, Rus ex­plained, den­drites would be the branch­es and synaps­es would be the leaves. The with­er­ing of those branch­es, in many cas­es, leads to less con­nec­tiv­i­ty and ef­fec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion with oth­er parts of the brain that in­flu­ence things like mo­ti­va­tion or re­ward.

“That’s why in many cas­es in neu­ropsy­chi­atric con­di­tions, you get de­pres­sion or you’ll get anx­i­ety, you get some cog­ni­tive chal­lenges, and you get a mix, de­pend­ing on the pa­tient,” he said. “A lot of neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive con­di­tions have cor­ti­cal at­ro­phy at their heart as well, and that’s some­thing that Delix’s plat­form over time will seek to pur­sue.”

Delix’s most ad­vanced com­pounds are non-hal­lu­cino­genic analogs of first-gen­er­a­tion psy­che­delics like psilo­cy­bin, LSD, DMT, and MD­MA. By curb­ing hal­lu­cino­genic ef­fect, Delix is hop­ing to avoid some of the safe­ty li­a­bil­i­ties of the ear­li­er gen­er­a­tion, as well as the need for in-clin­ic ad­min­is­tra­tion.

“While I def­i­nite­ly think that pa­tients will be helped by these first-gen­er­a­tion hal­lu­cino­genic med­i­cines, I think that we can help many, many more pa­tients with the non-hal­lu­cino­genic psy­choplas­to­gens, and so that’s re­al­ly, I think, what dif­fer­en­ti­ates us,” Ol­son said.

Of course, the com­pa­ny will have some catch­ing up to do. ATAI Life Sci­ences is al­ready rac­ing through the clin­ic with psilo­cy­bin- and R-ke­t­a­mine-based pro­grams. And Jonathan Sporn, the Har­vard sci­en­tist be­hind a cou­ple of ATAI’s pro­grams, launched his own com­pa­ny back in May to cre­ate analogs of some of the most com­mon psy­che­del­ic drugs.

When asked if an IPO is in the fu­ture, Rus re­spond­ed: “Our fo­cus is on the da­ta right now, but we’ll cer­tain­ly ex­am­ine all op­tions like any com­pa­ny would down the road.”

Fenlai Tan still gets chills thinking about the darkest day of his life.

Three out of eight lung cancer patients who received a tyrosine kinase inhibitor developed by his company, Betta Pharma, died in the span of a month. Tan, the chief medical officer, was summoned to Peking Union Medical College Hospital, where the head of the clinical trial department told him that the trial investigators would be conducting an autopsy to see if the patients had died of the disease — they were all very sick by the time they enrolled — or of interstitial lung disease, a deadly side effect tied to the TKI class that’s been reported in Japan.

BioNTech’s first mRNA-based vaccine site in Africa will call Rwanda home, and construction is set to start in mid-2022, the company announced Tuesday at a public health forum.

The German company signed a memorandum of understanding, after a meeting between Rwanda’s Minister of Health, Daniel Ngamije, Senegal’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Aïssata Tall Sall, and senior BioNTech officials. Construction plans have been finalized, and assets have been ordered. The agreement will help bring end-to-end manufacturing to Africa, and as many as several hundred million doses of vaccines per year, though initial production will be more modest.

Treg cells have been getting more and more attention recently among autoimmune specialists. There’s been Jeff Bluestone’s Sonoma, the $157 million launch of GentiBio this summer and Egle Therapeutics — which launched just last week — to name a few.

Now, there’s a new Treg player jumping in that wants to distinguish itself in the market: Mozart Therapeutics. Today, the biotech is emerging from stealth in its official debut with a $55 million Series A — with a bunch of A-list Big Pharma names on board a syndicate led by ARCH.