Psychedelics biotech set to go public via SPAC — pushing IV form of psilocybin into PhI

Psy­che­delics biotech Eleu­sis has its eyes on an ex­pan­sion, and it’s go­ing the SPAC route to get it.

The biotech an­nounced ear­li­er to­day that it’s team­ing up with a SPAC born out of as­set man­ag­er Sil­ver Spike Cap­i­tal to make Eleu­sis a pub­lic com­pa­ny. Once the deal goes through some­time in Q2 or Q3 this year, the com­bined com­pa­ny will be op­er­at­ed through new hold­ing com­pa­ny Eleu­sis Inc and trade on Nas­daq un­der the tick­er $ELEU.

The SPAC, aka Sil­ver Spike Ac­qui­si­tion Corp II, has a de­cent amount of cash banked: it’s worth $287.5 mil­lion. And Sil­ver Spike has long been in­ter­est­ed in in­vest­ments in cannabis and psy­che­delics, ac­cord­ing to Eleu­sis.

The biotech, which has been fo­cused on mak­ing psy­che­delics in­to med­i­cines, has its lead can­di­date — a psilo­cy­bin in­fu­sion called ELE-Psi­lo — in de­vel­op­ment for de­pres­sion. And if reg­u­la­tors give it the OK, ELE-Psi­lo will en­ter Phase I tri­als some­time this year.

Psilo­cy­bin is a hal­lu­cino­gen nor­mal­ly found in “mag­ic mush­rooms,” a type of nat­u­ral­ly-grown mush­room that has been used for recre­ation­al and re­li­gious pur­pos­es.

Ac­cord­ing to the biotech, an IV in­fu­sion of the hal­lu­cino­gen would be more ef­fec­tive than oral in­ges­tion be­cause it would cut down on vari­abil­i­ty. Ab­sorp­tion and me­tab­o­lism would vary sig­nif­i­cant­ly in dif­fer­ent pa­tients with the same dose of psilo­cy­bin when done oral­ly, which would de­crease when in­ject­ed straight in­to the blood­stream, Eleu­sis said.

Eleu­sis ex­pects to use the pro­ceeds re­ceived from SP­KB to sup­port con­tin­ued clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of ELE-Psi­lo, move ear­ly stage drug dis­cov­ery and trans­la­tion­al re­search for­ward and fa­cil­i­tate ex­pan­sion of Eleu­sis’s sub­sidiary An­dala, which man­ages psy­chi­atric care clin­ics na­tion­al­ly.

Cur­rent CEO Shlo­mi Raz will con­tin­ue to serve as CEO of the com­bined com­pa­ny, and the Board of Di­rec­tors is ex­pect­ed to in­clude cur­rent Eleu­sis board mem­bers and Sil­ver Spike CEO Scott Gor­don.

Raz ex­pressed op­ti­mism for the deal, say­ing in a state­ment that the tim­ing is ide­al for the com­pa­ny to go pub­lic, and that “we be­lieve ac­cess to pub­lic cap­i­tal mar­kets will ac­cel­er­ate our ef­forts.”