Any time you have an emerging sector like psychedelic medicine, where every week new players are going public, it’s hard to determine who has real substance, a real infrastructure and real potential.
On June 22, 2021, Mydecine Innovations Group Inc. separated itself from the pack when Roth Capital Partners gave the company’s stock a “Buy” rating, citing the “blockbuster potential” of its smoking cessation therapies.
Mydecine, an emerging biotech and life sciences company, is the first to treat smoking cessation and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with MYCO-001, a pure psilocybin from natural fungal sources. They now join a short list of companies to be covered in the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy space that includes Cybin Inc. (NEO:CYBN) (OTCQB:CLXPF) and Field Trip Health Ltd. (CSE:FTRP; FTRP.WT; OTCQX:FTRPF)
According to Elemer Piros, Ph.D., Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst at Roth Capital Markets “If Mydecine gets to the commercial stage, they are looking at enormous multibillion dollar markets with very little competition. Even if you look at the risk adjusted net present value of their lead programs, the intrinsic value of the company is over a billion dollars in our estimate.”
Joshua Bartch, Director, CEO and Co-Founder of Mydecine could not be happier with the validation the Roth rating provides his company. “Roth Capital Partners is an incredibly reputable institution, and Elemer Piros is a very, very smart individual and a seasoned health care analyst. They don’t go out and initiate coverage on anybody.”
“It’s a huge validator for us because they did a very deep dive on the company. Elmer Piros interviewed our patent attorney along with our entire drug development team at the University of Alberta, so he really got to understand the business from start to finish. At the end of it all, Roth decided that they were comfortable enough to give us a very, very strong rating.”
Bartch was also quick to add, “These are not paid-for research reports. These are independently sourced.”
Roth’s coverage has been a positive event for the company. The market reacted to the news almost immediately with an uptick in trading volume and a significant jump in their stock price.
The “Buy” recommendation from Roth came mostly on the strength of Mydecine’s work on smoking cessation. Piros assumed a 5% market penetration and extrapolated out from there. This positive outlook is further supported by promising data from Johns Hopkins that shows efficacy rates in excess of 80% (12 months of complete abstinence) for individuals who had been smoking for more than 30 years and had tried to quit more than 5 times. It’s welcome news considering that 1 in 5 people in the United States die from smoking cigarettes each year.
But Bartch is convinced that Mydecine can drastically outperform Roth’s market penetration estimate considering work that has started on its second-generation drug MYCO-004, a patch-delivered tryptamine, that can be administered in a significantly shorter timeframe.
Typically, the effects of psilocybin can last 6 to 8 hours. When coupled with therapy involving trained professionals, treatment can get onerous and expensive. MYCO-004 is expected to last only 2 hours which should make psilocybin-based therapy much more viable from a commercialization and a scalability standpoint.
Bartch also sees new indications for this kind of treatment. “It’s important to note that our treatment for smoking cessation is something that can be adapted for addiction as a whole. That’s a much larger market.”
To top it all off, Pfizer Inc. (PFE.N) recently paused distribution of their market leading anti-smoking drug Chantix out of concerns it contains a carcinogen. “Our largest competitor just got taken off the shelves, which was totally unexpected,” Bartch declared. “Now it’s a wide-open market and we have by far the best drug available.”
It‘s definitely an exciting time for Mydecine, with more positive coverage expected in the weeks and months ahead. “We’ve been talking to a number of very well-known banks. Once they do a deep dive on the company and really dissect our IP, our novel molecule libraries, the infrastructure, and the team, as well as the current clinical trials and the data being produced, it’s an incredibly compelling story and it’s also much deeper and much more robust than meets the public eye.” If Bartch is right, all eyes will be on Mydecine.