Jacob, would you rather build a company around one bold, high-risk scientific hypothesis or assemble a diversified pipeline that reduces risk but diffuses focus and why?

I don't think you have to pick on that axis.

I do think there's an element to the question that's really important.

How much bandwidth does you and your team have in order to execute really well on the things that you're choosing to do? I think at the hyper extremes of this, you know, do you choose one program or do you build a pipeline? People do go a little too far.

I think that some people don't build enough optionality value because they go very far in the direction of a single asset with a single indication.

I think they also go very much too far in the direction of building a pipeline that's unsustainable.

So I do think there's some sweet spot between that polarity where you have the bandwidth and the capital, the resources to execute really effectively on a pipeline that is appropriately modest and yet has greater potential for impact.

You know, what's the current appetite for developing drugs from nature? And have you seen or in conversation with other startups that are trying to really come up with new solutions to improve healths?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question because for a while I thought maybe there aren't so many commercial path opportunities to have impact in botanicals without going through chemical derivatives.

My mind is a little more open, but let me start on the why do we make chemical derivatives before I dive into the other piece.

I think People have this conception that we're making these like derivatives from nature exclusively because we are these, you know, capitalism driven and we're trying to make, you know, money and profit.

Right.

It's not true.

And certainly at Sensorium, if nature gives us the perfect molecule, oh my gosh, we're just going to tell the world that nature has given us the perfect molecule and they should, right? But nature gives us really interesting pharmacology, really interesting mechanisms, but nature did not.

Well, I don't, I don't know how much you can share with us about, you know, where things stand at Sensorium or anything we should keep an eye out for in the future.

I'll frame

the concept by saying it's not new.

We're just doing it in a really new way.

In fact, 85% of all FDA approved medicines for the brain and particularly biased in psychiatry come from an observation of nature.

And I'll just give you an example that's very recent.

Just a couple years ago, Bristol Myers Squibb bought a company called Corona Therapeutics, like a $14 billion acquisition for a drug that's now called Cobenfi.

And this is a breakthrough, first in a generation of medicines for schizophrenia.

How do you apply science to this, you know, to the oral history, the cultural history, what's known in the literature to think about what makes a medicine?

Like, how do you keeping up with that?

Yeah.

One thing to recognize is w- I don't see Sensorium in competition with any mental health company, and that may sound, sound strange, um, because, you know, in, in fact, you know, superficially w-we are.

But the unmet need in psychiatry is so large that there can be 20 or 30 or 50 companies that are successful, and we still will not have addressed the unmet need.

So we, we pay a lot of attention to it, um, so that we can learn from how others are having success and, and, and we can apply that to our pipeline.

Um, but I often, you know, get the question about, you know, the competitive landscape, and I, I really just don't even feel that sense of competition 'cause, 'cause the problem is s-so big.

One thing we do a, a lot of is, uh, retrain, you know, methods that become natural product specific.

What was that moment?