A longstanding non-profit organization championing psychedelic research has accepted a sizable donation from a for-profit biopharmaceutical company listed on the Nasdaq.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, better known as MAPS, announced today that it has accepted a US$500,000 donation from atai Impact, the philanthropic arm of Berlin-based atai Life Sciences (NASDAQ: ATAI). 

In separate conversations, MAPS founder and executive director Rick Doblin and atai co-founder and CEO Florian Brand provided details about the donation and spoke broadly on how it highlights the need for greater collaboration among emerging for-profit psychedelic companies and existing non-profit organizations.

More For-Profit Companies, Less Donations

Doblin, who founded MAPS in 1986 and has been pushing for psychedelic research and policy reform since long before the so-called psychedelic renaissance, says that with the rising interest in psychedelics, many people who were previously inclined to make donations to organizations like MAPS are instead investing their money in publicly traded companies.

“As we’ve pioneered in this area, particularly with the progress we’ve made with our Phase 2 trials and heading into Phase 3, we’ve seen the rise of for-profit psychedelic companies, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to raise donations,” says Doblin. 

‘Moral Obligation’ To Support

At atai, Brand recognizes that non-profit companies in the psychedelic space are often better suited than for-profit ones at addressing areas related to mental health such as education, access, and stigmatization, and acknowledges that without organizations like MAPS, the current landscape might not exist.

“MAPS is well ahead and has really built up a vast amount of knowledge, including funding research and doing work to build out the ecosystem, and we’ve benefitted,” says Brand. “If you’re emerging out of an ecosystem, it’s important to find ways to cooperate, to collaborate, and to give back. In my perspective, there is a moral obligation to support what we’ve emerged from, and to operate in a collaborative and sustainable way.”

Atai made the donation to MAPS through its philanthropic arm, Impact, which launched in October 2021 with the goal of creating harmony among commercial and non-profit entities to (collectively) better address the global mental health crisis. The company has dedicated one percent of the proceeds of its IPO to Impact. 

Donation Will Support MAPS’ Health Equity Program

The unrestricted donation to the non-profit will be used to help support several initiatives at MAPS, including its Health Equity Program, which intends to increase training and representation of people of color in clinical trials—a benefit that could extend far beyond either organization.

“This is something that is of particular interest to atai and also to us, because what we’ve found, to our disappointment, is that the number of patients of color that have volunteered for our studies is far below their representation in the population,” says Doblin. “We really need to train more therapists of color, so that patients of color will feel more comfortable coming into the treatment space.”

More Cross-Pollination Needed

Brand says that while MAPS and atai might operate in different ways, they face similar challenges and are better suited to tackle them if they are aligned. His hope is that the donation will trigger more cross-pollination in the psychedelic ecosystem; not just among for-profit and non-profit companies, but among the various substance-assisted training programs offered by these organizations, too.

“I hope that the therapists that are being trained in this space will not only be limited to one company or one program or one substance. If people are administering MDMA-assisted therapy, they should also have the option to be trained to administer, say, the therapy that Compass is developing,” says Brand. 

“I think there’s a lot there that we can explore together while realizing that we have to deliver shareholder value, and it’s great to demonstrate that there’s room for collaboration, and that we can define areas where it’s worthwhile to cooperate.”

Both Doblin and Brand agree that given the severity of the mental health crisis and the lack of available treatment options, finding solutions will require a kind of collaboration the psychedelic space has yet to fully embrace.

“Our view at MAPS is that the scale of the need is so great that addressing the enormity of depression, PTSD, and other mental illnesses, and trying to move toward mass mental health, is going to require all the actors in the field—profits and non-profits—to work together,” says Doblin. “It’s not really a question of competition.”