Eywa
case study
Biosynthetic production of psilocybin
Pre-Seed
Montevideo, Uruguay

What's the Problem?

Currently, one out of four people suffer from a diagnosed mental illness. Modern Pharmacological treatments treat only the neurochemical imbalance of the disease and 40% of the patients presents resistance. Furthermore, these medications take 2 to 4 weeks of chronic treatment to present the first signs of clinical improvement. Unlike current treatments, psychedelics act immediately and present a half of relapse rate after a year of treatment compared to classic antidepressants. However, within the industry the main challenge is the common usage of chemical synthesis. These psychedelics have higher production costs and present many difficulties in the scaling process. The actual biocatalytic process to produce psilocybin, presents a few limitations: the time of production, the cost of the starting material and the outdated techniques in extraction from the bioreactor.

Eywa
Eywa
Eywa
Eywa

How are they Solving it?

We are building the best platform to scale psychedelics. Making them accessible for everyone, everywhere. We develop tryptamines such as psilocybin, DMT and their analogs. Our first product will be psilocybin. We are working on a new biosynthetic strategy to obtain our Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs), in a fast, cheap, and eco-friendly way. We will use specific enzymes as production machinery, with an accessible and simple starting material: tryptamine. We reach our product in the half of steps Vs competition, with a 60% total synthesis yield and a 50% cost reduction.

SphereBio

Next Startup

SphereBio