FTRP - Field Trip Gets Positive Patent News
Field Trip Health Ltd. (NASDAQ: FTRP) announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued a Notice of Allowance for Field Trip’s patent application No. 17/364,047 for claims related to FT-104 (informally known as “Isoprocin Glutarate”), Field Trip ’s first novel psychedelic molecule in development. FT-104 is being developed as a more efficient treatment with the experience lasting less than four hours. It has a potency and pharmacology similar to psilocybin and the cost and accessibility are also better with this compound. Claims in the allowed patent application titled, “Tryptamine Prodrugs”, cover the composition of matter, use, and manufacturing of a family of hemi-ester compounds of hydroxytryptamines, including FT-104.
Dr. Nathan Bryson, Field Trip’s Chief Science Officer said in a statement, “Since inception, the strategy at Field Trip for our first development project was to create a novel drug substance that could produce a consistent trip time, in the range of three hours. We achieved this by combining a novel prodrug strategy to make demonstrable improvements on a known class of psychedelic substances. To further de-risk the project, we filed a Track One U.S. patent application on June 30, 2021, in order to accelerate the decision by examiners and achieve allowance, and granting, as early as possible in the development process. We are elated that the USPTO has formally allowed our patent application within seven months of filing and are now poised to continue development of FT-104 knowing that we have a robust intellectual property position to build on.”
Notices of Allowance are issued by the USPTO after it has thoroughly examined a patent application to ensure it complies with all requirements under United States patent law. This includes a rigorous evaluation to confirm that the claimed subject material is both novel and non-obvious with respect to prior art. The formal granting of the patent will occur in a subsequent administrative step.
FT-104 is a more soluble, more stable prodrug form of 4-hydroxy-N,N-diisopropyltryptamine (4-HO-DiPT or “Isoprocin”). The psychedelic compound, 4-HO-DiPT, was previously synthesized by Alexander (Sasha) Shulgin, a chemist and psychopharmacologist, who not only self-administered many of the substances he made but also reported their psychoactive effects in the collective works called “Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved,” or TIHKAL for short. In his works, Shulgin stated: “??I truly doubt that there is another psychedelic drug, anywhere, that can match [4-HO-DiPT] for speed, intensity, brevity, and sensitive to dose, at least one that is active orally,” adding that “To be on a trip, then to be back pretty much in two hours and really baseline in another hour? Most unusual. If there will ever be an acceptance of drugs such as these, in a psychotherapeutic context, a short duration is of extreme value to both the patient and the therapist.”
Joseph del Moral, Field Trip’s CEO added: “We designed FT-104 to provide a more convenient, practical, and consistent experience while retaining the characteristics of a classical serotonin psychedelic. These aspects are important therapeutic and commercial differentiators which may truly separate FT-104 from psilocybin for clinical operators and for patients seeking psychedelic psychotherapy.”