About us

Founded in 2016, our first major initiative is developing psilocybin therapy through late-stage clinical trials in Europe and North America for patients with treatment-resistant depression.

We are taking a new approach to mental health and are committed to developing care pathways and therapies that will help patients and their families, and ease the burden on healthcare systems. Backed by a team of leading experts in medicine, mental health, business, and academia, we put the patient at the centre of everything we do.

COMPASS co-founders George Goldsmith and Ekaterina Malievskaia experienced significant difficulties finding help for a family member’s depression some years ago. They also encountered many others who have struggled with ineffective treatments, severe side effects, and the feelings of helplessness and disempowerment. COMPASS Pathways was created as a response to these challenges.

COMPASS’s founders are driven by direct and personal experience of treatment-resistant depression, of the inconsistency of health system responses to mental health issues, and of the need for better care options. They and the company are committed to developing patient pathways and therapies that improve mental health care, and then making these available and accessible to patients who will benefit from them. COMPASS will do this in collaboration and partnership with others.

Our work is based on scientific rigour, and we will adhere to the highest standards of intellectual and scientific integrity in all that we do. We expect the same approach from those with whom we work.

We believe that improved access to scientific data is key to accelerating the translation of basic research to clinical use that allows patients to receive improved diagnostics and care in the most timely way. We will adhere to the highest standards in collecting data, and will make data available to the research community as soon as possible after study completion. We will publish all clinical study results, positive and negative, in an open and transparent way, recognising and attributing appropriately the contributions of the partner organisations and individuals with whom we have worked.

We want the benefits of our research, and our results, to be available and accessible to researchers, thereby inspiring and accelerating the development of therapies that will change patients’ lives.

We wish to build a sustainable business model, discovering, developing and supplying innovative therapies to current and future patients. To this end, we will be open to flexible, value-driven approaches to pricing and the exercise of intellectual property rights that will both incentivise innovation and enable access to it.

We develop innovative treatment approaches along a well-defined path: from translational research through regulatory approval to patient access. Translational research takes findings in clinical research and moves them into medical practice and meaningful health outcomes.

Clinical and pharmaceutical development

We are developing our clinical research programme using scientific advice processes supported by regulatory agencies.

Academic research

We want to increase access to treatments and options for patients, and to further research that will improve mental health outcomes. In addition to using our psilocybin for our own clinical trials, we are making it available, free of charge, to members of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) through its Medicines Chest programme. We are looking at extending this approach to other eligible scientific associations and researchers with approved protocols.

Partnerships

Collaboration and partnership are key to developing a new approach to mental health. We are bringing together digital health innovators, healthcare systems, and payer systems for the benefit of patients.

Tackling unmet need in mental health care

The individual and societal burden of mental health disorders is significant. Our initial focus is on developing psilocybin therapy for patients suffering with treatment-resistant depression, though we will also explore other innovative treatments and additional indications in due course. Depression is an area of significant unmet medical need and the leading cause of disability and ill-health worldwide.

We have put a lot of thought into the kind of organisation we want to build, the culture we want to have, and what we want to champion.

Our whole team has worked together to articulate four core values that define who we are, what we do, and how we do it.

COMPASS is a life sciences company dedicated to accelerating patient access to evidence-based innovation in mental health. Each person on our team is committed to making a valuable contribution to improving patient experiences and outcomes in mental health care. If you are interested in joining our small and rapidly growing team, please contact us.