Meet the Startup That Wants To Deliver Ketamine to Your Door
Ketamine is on the come up in the pharmaceutical world. Once confined to nightclubs and operating rooms, the drug is quickly gaining recognition as a valuable tool for treating mental health disorders including depression and anxiety.
Amid these rising tides, Wondermed has emerged, offering telehealth consultations and, potentially, the ability to deliver the drug right to your doorstep—all while building out a virtual platform and collecting data on how to use the molecule more effectively.
At the moment, the company provides a mail order service for courses of ketamine lozenges to those who’ve been prescribed the drug along with a telehealth software bridge between doctor and patient. Wondermed currently operates in five states — California, Texas, Florida, New York and Connecticut, though it plans to expand to another eight to 10 states in the next two weeks.
In the long run however, its plans are much bigger than being a link between doctors and patients.
“We generate more than 3,000 data points on every patient that comes into the funnel, and actually receives the medication,” says co-founder & Managing Director Jose Aycart.
His company is building out its online platform to collect and analyze patient data and provide mental health support services that may be useful, regardless of whether or not a patient is taking ketamine.
These data show in granular detail how ketamine therapies work. Does the route of administration matter? Does time of day matter? What types of patients are most likely to experience positive outcomes? It’s this data that represents the biggest business opportunity for Wondermed. The specifics of the monetization are still being worked out, but Aycart says it will never sell anonymized patient data to other companies.
Wondermed is in the midst of a seed funding round, targeting $7 million by the end of the month; It’s raised $5.6 million so far.
The company makes a bit of revenue by charging patients for consultations, but in the event that a patient doesn’t wind up using Wondermed’s platform, the consultation fee is refunded. For patients who are prescribed ketamine, the company charges only as much as the drugs cost them ($249 per month, which includes four doses), so neither Wondermed nor the physicians in its employ are incentivized to over-prescribe.
The drugs themselves are supplied by Tailor Made Compounding, a pharmacy in Nicholasville, Kentucky, and Wondermed is working on additional contracts in the pipeline with several other suppliers.
. Wondermed’s transformation comes as ketamine, which has typically been restricted to use as a general anesthetic, is quickly gaining recognition as a valuable tool for treating mental health disorders like depression and anxiety.
“What I’ve found interesting is how rapidly this field has emerged,” says Steven Grant, a drug and addiction researcher who spent 25 years at the National Institute on Drug Abuse and is now retired.
Ketamine is a simple organic molecule that first gained clinical popularity in the 1960s as an anesthetic. It produces a dissociative state in patients and dulls pain. Once in the bloodstream, the molecule travels to the brain where it binds to a protein called NMDA on the surface of neurons. NMDA has a variety of jobs, but it’s best-known for its role in learning, memory, and neuroplasticity—or the brain’s ability to form new pathways between neurons.
While the research into why ketamine is such an effective treatment for depression and anxiety is ongoing, the consensus so far is that the molecule’s power comes from this ability to rewrite or rewire the brain’s circuitry. If you’ve ever had an anxiety attack or a depressive episode, it can often feel like you’re stuck in a mental loop. Ketamine, it seems, offers a way to break that loop.
“It was this idea that you're increasing your neurological connections in the brain,” says Aycart. “You have the opportunity now to spark new forms of thought, new forms of emotion, or even new ideas.”
Unlike selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) and other traditional drugs used to treat depression, ketamine’s effects are fast-acting—often appearing within minutes or hours of administration—and don’t require taking the drug daily.
“It really is revolutionary, and that’s why now more than ever, people are starting to get access to it, and companies like ourselves are really trying to bring it to people as an alternative form of medicine,” says Aycart.
Grant says the rise of ketamine clinics and telehealth services like Wondermed are likely a net positive because they increase patient access to drugs patients need, but he also has reservations about how the therapies are being applied.
Many of these psychoactive drugs—especially ketamine—are intended to be used in tandem with therapy, or at least under the supervision of a trained professional. Increasing the brain’s plasticity is a valuable tool for breaking out of depressive loops, but unless a professional is there to help the patient settle into a healthier mental pattern, the full benefits may be left on the table.
Wondermed offers a variety of supplementary support and strategies along with the drugs themselves, but taking advantage of these tools is left to the patient’s discretion. Grant would like to see a larger focus on extending and expanding that auxiliary support.
The company says it’s focused on building out the platform’s nonmedicinal mental health strategies—things like breathwork, meditation, music therapy—and adding them to an app. If they can get enough people on board, the eventual plan could be to sell health insights back to patients through a subscription model or something similar. They may even patent their own psychedelic molecules in the future. But all of this is likely quite a ways out.
“What we're trying to do is very new, and the landscape yet hasn't been built out,” says Aycart.
Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify Wondermed's monthly rate for ketamine lozenges.
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Courtesy of Kore Infrastructure
The idea behind Kore’s technology is similar to that of other companies also deploying the process known as pyrolysis: You take organic waste like deadwood and brush, heat them in a low oxygen environment at a very high temperature, and collect the gasses and carbon char left over. When all goes well, this avenue of hydrogen production can be carbon negative, meaning that CO2 is removed from the carbon cycle that usually sees it burned into the atmosphere.
When a pile of manure is left in a field, for instance, it naturally converts into methane and CO2—two greenhouse gasses that warm the planet. But if the manure is fed into a pyrolysis machine, about half of that carbon is converted into solid carbon, also called char. In this form, the carbon atoms can’t be broken down by microbes and released as CO2. The element is then sequestered as a solid, and its potential to warm the atmosphere is eliminated.
Now, after 14 years of quietly developing and building its technology, Kore is coming out of stealth mode and ready to start selling its pyrolysis machines to practically anybody looking to process organic waste. The company’s machines can handle a variety of inputs—from nut shells, agricultural tree prunings and biosolids to construction and demolition waste.
“The big differentiator with Kore is having steel on the ground, having something operational, having something to show,” Kore founder and executive chairman Cornelius Shields told dot.LA. “If you're going to build these types of facilities, you have to go through a lot of pain.”
Part of the reason that Kore suddenly seems to be at the forefront of the pyrolysis race is that it’s had a considerable head start. The company has been quietly operating since 2008 and built its first full-scale pyrolysis machine in 2015. These machines are massive, occupying a real estate footprint of close to an acre; to the untrained eye, they look like an unholy amalgamation of pipes, tanks and valves. At maximum capacity, one of the machines can process 24 tons of feedstock per day to produce 1,000 kilograms of green hydrogen and six tons of solid carbon char.
Kore Infrastructure's pyrolysis machines in Downtown L.A.Courtesy of Kore Infrastructure
Kore’s technology eventually drew the interest of SoCalGas, which provided a $1.5 million grant in 2017 that allowed the startup to begin setting up operations in Downtown L.A. By August 2021, the company had completed permitting and construction of the plant and began running its pyrolysis machine as a proof of concept for commercial applications.
“We have been pretty quiet,” Shields said. “As a founder, I just wanted to make sure that we were ready [and] that the technology was working before we came to market—that we knew we had real data, and it just wasn't a hope and a prayer.”
While Kore is still coy on its exact business strategy going forward, Shields says it's fair to estimate that a pyrolysis machine will cost up to tens of millions of dollars to purchase. That’s not a small chunk of change—but compared to the cost of building a full pyrolysis plant, which can cost $100 million or more, Kore thinks it may be able to entice buyers.
“We're selling modular systems to industry,” according to Shields. “That kind of scaling is far faster because an industrial client can say, ‘Okay, let's do two modules to start. Let's see how that goes, and then we can add other modules.’”
Pyrolysis’ appeal is bolstered by financial incentives like the California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) tax credits and the federal 45Q tax credit, which award companies for saving and sequestering carbon emissions. Then there’s the hydrogen itself, which currently costs about $10 per kilogram at the gas pump if you drive a hydrogen car. And even the char left over from the process is valuable: The solid carbon can be used in fertilizers and to strengthen concrete, but it can also be burned as a coal substitute. (Obviously, burning the char undoes all the hard work of sequestering the carbon in the first place—but for hard-to-decarbonize industries like steel and cement production, a carbon-neutral fuel source is a massive improvement over coal.)
“We can decarbonize transportation fuels in the state [and] decarbonize the supply chain for natural gas—and then use the same technology to make hydrogen as demand for that ramps up,” Kore executive vice president Steve Wirtel told dot.LA. It’s this sort of double-edged benefit that makes Kore’s technology exciting for Wirtel: Pyrolysis converts carbon that would otherwise warm the planet into a coal substitute, and produces green hydrogen in the process.
Given those multiple revenue streams, pyrolysis is becoming an increasingly attractive waste disposal avenue, and Kore is hoping to have its first commercial machine sold and delivered to a customer by the end of this year. The company is also looking to raise an “institutional round of capital,” Shields said, citing interest from private equity investors.
He added that Kore is already drawing international interest in its technology, but is planning to stay conservative for the time being and focus on scaling locally—part and parcel of the slow and deliberate pace that’s served the company well to this point.
“There's so much opportunity in our backyard in California, that's where we're going to stay for now,” Shields said.
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