- Functional mushrooms are a rapidly-growing $23 billion market
- Powerful mushroom nootropics show great promise in promoting mental health and boosting immune system response
- Strong synergies with psychedelic drug development
From crisis comes opportunity. It’s a cliché, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t often true.
The global Mental Health Crisis is truly a “crisis” in every respect.
a) Over 1 billion people suffer from stress-related disorders like depression, anxiety, addiction and PTSD
b) This costs the global economy over $1 trillion per year in lost productivity
c) Current treatment options are woefully inadequate
Psychedelic Stock Watch laid out the picture in a recent full-length feature.
There is also an enormous economic opportunity here. The mental health services sector is
a $225 billion per year market in the United States alone,
according to Statista.
A new life sciences company that is taking an innovative approach to capitalizing on this opportunity is
Mind Cure Health Inc (CAN:MCUR).
The Company will commence public trading via IPO, and Mind Cure is ready to hit the ground running.
Mind Cure’s functional mushrooms division is ready for launch in the U.S in early November and soon after in Canada. The Company’s product line of Moonbeam organic mushrooms consists of three nootropic formulations: Lion’s Mane, Reishi and Turkey Tail. These formulations target focus, energy and immunity (respectively).
How does this connect at all to the Mental Health Crisis? It’s called biohacking.
Part of the explanation comes from
Tero Isokauppila, author of
Healing Mushrooms. Isokauppila touts the “adaptogenic properties” of Reishi mushrooms to help better manage and cope with stress.
Over 1 billion people are dealing with stress-related mental health disorders and effective treatments are not (yet) on the market. There is clearly a lot of demand (and a market) for any nutritional supplement that can be a preventative aid against these mental health disorders.
Indeed, functional mushrooms already represent a large-and-growing niche in the huge dietary supplements space. Nootropics.
A $23 billion market today, projected to grow by 50% by 2025.
But there is much more to the functional mushrooms market than just Reishi mushrooms. And the Mental Health Crisis goes well beyond the stress-related conditions already mentioned.
Two dimensions to the Mental Health Crisis
The second dimension to the Mental Health Crisis is
cognitive decline. In aging populations, this huge problem is destined to get much worse.
By 2011, 16 million Americans were already suffering from some form of cognitive decline (
according to the CDC) – more than 5% of the population. Today, 5.8 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease alone.
Caring for Alzheimer’s patients is expensive. In the U.S. treatment
starts at $20,000 per year, reaching $40,000 by year 4 of this degenerative condition.
Globally, this projects to hundreds of millions of people suffering from cognitive decline. And hundreds of billions of dollars in additional treatment costs.
Enter functional mushrooms.
Functional mushrooms guru Paul Stamets recently reported some amazing clinical findings in an interview with Joe Rogan (see that interview
here).
According to Stamets, pre-clinical research (testing on mice) shows that Lions Mane mushrooms can not only halt but
even reverse the build-up of plaque on brain neurons that is the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease.
That’s two mushrooms (and two revenue streams) to start to address this Crisis.
Turkey Tail mushrooms? No connection to the Mental Health Crisis.
But even before a nasty little bug called “COVID-19” erupted, functional mushrooms like Turkey Tail were already highly sought after for their immune-boosting properties.
From functional mushrooms to psychedelic drug R&D
Mind Cure’s business model centers around “Five Spheres”.
- Product Discovery
- Nootropic Formulations
- GMP and API manufacturing & supply
- Clinical Research
- Clinical Research Technology
Functional mushrooms are an important element of several of these spheres. However, in its prospectus Mind Cure has also made clear its intention to branch into psychoactive nootropics and psychedelic drug research.
Over the longer term, psychedelic drugs are expected to play a pivotal role in addressing the Mental Health Crisis – via next-generation drugs and therapies that are providing (in clinical research) much higher success rates than existing treatments.
See: Psychedelic Drugs: Powerful Medicine, Life-Changing Results
So why doesn’t Mind Cure leap into psychedelic drug R&D today?
Several reasons, starting with timing and expense.
Psychedelic drugs (with the exception of ketamine) are still broadly illegal around the world. Even engaging in research with these substances is either severely constrained or simply prohibited, depending on jurisdiction.
The Company has outlined areas of interest in the psychedelics space
Functional mushrooms not only offer strong synergies with psychedelics with respect to capitalizing on the Mental Health Crisis. They represent a potentially large revenue stream – today.
Functional mushrooms are a robust market (and investment) opportunity alone. But as noted in a recent Psychedelic Stock Watch article, this nootropics market is also the perfect stepping stone to psychedelic drug development.
Build markets and supply chains. Offset R&D costs.
It’s a strong business model for a very big opportunity.
Ready to run with this opportunity is a management team with decades of experience in launching startups and scaling operations. Mind Cure has strategically positioned the Company to capitalize on the Mental Health Crisis.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But in the real world, that’s not always the quickest route.
Mind Cure has devised a potent long-term strategy to capitalize on the major opportunity to develop new psychedelic drugs for the Mental Health Crisis. To get there, it’s starting with the low-hanging fruit: functional mushrooms.
Today, Compass Pathways is stealing most of the headlines with its own IPO plans. It just “upsized” its IPO financing to $127.5 million.
Notable among participating investors is Wall Street heavyweight, Mike Novogratz.
Yet with Big Pharma having
largely walked away from mental health drug research,
the playing field here is wide open.
Emerging psychedelic drugs will offer a multitude of drug development opportunities (in multi-billion-dollar treatment markets) for many years to come. This is a sector truly in its infancy.
Compass Pathways is expected to debut with a market valuation in excess of $500 million. And it could do well for its shareholders.
However, with a compact market cap and a business model built for this long haul, investors may find a better opportunity for outsized gains with Mind Cure Health.
DISCLOSURE: Mind Cure Health is a client of Psychedelic Stock Watch
