Entrepreneurship

Abstract

On this page, we share the key insights we gained from our personal research and our connection with companies and specialists.
While highlighting the valuable lessons we learned from our work, which all play an important role when taking our project from plan to action!

Our chosen topics

Three specific topics, business plans, the current market situation, and the public perception stood out to us as key criteria for our successful entrepreneurship. Below, these topics are described and concluded upon to highlight the most significant parts of our entrepreneurial work.

Business plan and marketing models

With the knowledge gained from researching and studying psilocybin production in bacteria, we compiled our business plan. The plan details our in-depth analysis of the market surrounding psilocybin as a product, our relations to researchers and companies working with psilocybin, the legality surrounding the production of class II psychedelic substances, and the logistics of running our business and pricing our product concerning competitors.

The models described were recommended to us by Canify A/S, who themselves were a start-up company in 2019; the models granted us insight into each of their respective areas, which all are summed up under our implementation site. In addition, we narrowed down our sales to Business-to-business to avoid the tight restrictions of direct customers sales and marketing and to further strengthen our focus on supplying researchers and companies alike.

Current market situation and process innovation in psilocybin production

The current market surrounding the production and vending of psilocybin for scientific use is limited to manufacturers either chemically synthesizing the product or growing large quantities of psilocybin producing fungi with low extraction rates of 13 mg psilocybin extracted from 1.000 mg mushrooms. Both processes leave the customers paying a significant price of upwards to 2.430 DKK pr gram psilocybin for a clean product. With help from Lars Folke regarding enzyme kinetics, we calculated that synthesizing psilocybin in E. coli would grant us a production cost of ~679 DKK pr gram psilocybin, a third of the current market price.

With the promising results from researchers synthesizing the product in vivo utilizing E. coli as the host organism within the last five years, we are confident that shifting to psilocybin produced in bacteria will not only lower the cost of psilocybin significantly but also fuel the research surrounding the use of psilocybin in the treatment of depression and mental disorders alike.

Progress in social acceptance

Based on the increased occurrence of depression in the last century, we have conducted a survey to get the public opinion on the use of psychedelics in treating depression. We found that 81 % of participants had a neutral or positive opinion towards the idea of psychedelics as a pharmaceutical tool for the treatment of depression, with 70 % of these having a positive or very positive opinion. Likewise, our talk with Dr. Oliver Rumle Hovmandin the third installment of our podcast brought attention to the increasing academic interest in the topic; exemplified by the increasing appearance of clinical trials with psychedelics.

We believe that this positive attitude towards the use of psychedelics in healthcare, combined with the increasing interest in research regarding alternative medicines, are the perfect conditions for our company to take root in a market with an expected upsurge in demand.