Today’s guest is, Dr. Michael Gold, the Chief R&D Officer at Compass Pathways, which is developing a psilocybin treatment for treatment-resistant depression. A neurologist by training, he has spent nearly 30 years developing brain drugs at companies including Bristol-Myers Squibb, GSK and AbbVie.
In this episode, Dr. Gold explains why brain drugs fail so often, even with hundreds of millions of dollars and top scientists behind them. He walks through the structural challenges of neuroscience: limited animal models, subjective outcome measures, and diseases that begin decades before symptoms appear. He also shares why rigorous, high-quality data is an ethical obligation to the patients who volunteer for trials, and how better biomarkers are changing the field’s odds. Finally, he discusses Compass Pathways’ path toward potential FDA approval and how psychedelics could reshape the way psychiatry defines mental illness.