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XAt-Home Ketamine Injections Offer a 'Blueprint' for Slew of New Anti-Depression Drugs
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.

Once known as a club drug, ketamine is now available as an at-home depression treatment.
With at least $1,500 and a psychiatric prescription, Angelenos can order a concierge at-home I.V. service through The I.V. Doc.
The company is partnering with Pasithea, a Florida-based biotech company focused on therapies for psychological and neurological disorders to deliver treatments for those whose anxiety, depression or PTSD is too crippling for them to leave the house.
Ketamine, which was developed as an anesthetic before gaining widespread infamy as a club drug, has become popular in recent years after a large body of research found it to be extremely effective in treating mental health disorders including depression and anxiety.
Because the drug needs to be administered with medical oversight, the practice will open the door for a new medical infrastructure. Instead of picking up prescription drugs from a pharmacy, patients can sit in a ketamine clinic for a few hours as the drug slowly seeps into their bloodstream via I.V. — or, in this case, order it for home consumption.
Pasithea psychiatrists prescribe patients ketamine "off-label," a term that describes when regulated drugs are prescribed for medical reasons other than their intended use.
A treatment program that costs $6,000 includes a psychiatric assessment to determine if the program is appropriate, six injections over the course of two to three weeks, and a follow up assessment to determine further counseling.
It's not the only one offering at-home care. Psychedelics-focused company Mindbloom facilitates ketamine tablet prescriptions sent to one's home. It provides users with someone to guide the patient through the journey.
Pasithea is trying to remake how drugs are delivered and administered.
"This is like a new field of psychiatry and neurology, what you call interventional psychiatry. It's basically psychiatrists giving drugs through different methods and routes of administration," Pasithea CEO Tiago Reis Marques said. "A big problem of this approach...particularly with drugs that need to be given by infusion, is a problem of access."
Drugs that don't exist as a pill are often extremely difficult to take because they often require a medical professional to inject them into a patient, rendering the pharmacy model useless for drugs like ketamine. But until recently, there has been little infrastructure to administer these therapies.
Clinics have popped up around Los Angeles to administer psychedelic drugs, including Ketamine Clinics Los Angeles, which was started in 2014 and administers intravenous ketamine injections.
There's also Field Trip Health, a psychedelics pharmaceutical company based in Canada. It opened a ketamine clinic in Santa Monica earlier this year that combines cognitive behavioral therapy with intramuscular ketamine injections.
"These kinds of therapy — psychedelic therapies, ketamine-assisted therapy — there's going to be a whole new clinical infrastructure that's built to deliver this, because the feeling you get when you walk into a place has a significant impact on the outcomes that people are going to have," said Field Trip Health co-founder Ronan Levy about his company's ketamine clinics.
Similarly, Pasithea has established a slew of "anti-depression clinics'' in the United Kingdom that prescribe intravenous ketamine injections to those who have depression. The company sees the ketamine clinics as a precursor to new forms of therapy that could one day involve psychedelics like psilocybin (colloquially known as magic mushrooms) and MDMA.
"We can leverage and we can use the infrastructure we've built to reintroduce any type of treatment that cannot be given in a typical pill form and needs to be given through these new methods and new routes of administration," Marques, who is also a psychiatrist, said.
Despite the many innovations that have come out of ketamine therapy, they rarely reach the people who often experience a lot of depression, anxiety and PTSD: the poor. Very few insurance companies foot the bill for ketamine treatments (which can cost upwards of $1,000) because ketamine has to be prescribed for off-label.
"It's out of pocket, it's not for everyone, unfortunately," Marques said. "But we hope to expand our reach and be able to provide the other types of treatments."
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated Mindbloom provides ketamine to patients and that it is based in Seattle. The company is remote and only facilitates prescriptions sent by third-parties.
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- Ketamine Clinics Are Opening Across Los Angeles - dot.LA ›
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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Tech Groups Push Back Against Texas’ Controversial New Social Media Law
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Two groups representing social media giants are trying to block a Texas law protecting users’ political social media content.
NetChoice—whose members include the Culver City-based video-sharing app TikTok—and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, the Washington Post reported Friday. HB 20, which went into effect Wednesday, allows residents who believe they were unfairly censored to sue social media companies with over 50 million U.S. users. Tech companies would also have to integrate a system for users to oppose potential content removal.
The law, which was initially signed by Governor Greg Abbott in September, was previously barred by a federal district judge but was lifted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans. NetChoice and CCIA claim the law violates the First Amendment and seek to vacate it by filing the application with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.
“[The law] strips private online businesses of their speech rights, forbids them from making constitutionally protected editorial decisions, and forces them to publish and promote objectionable content,” NetChoice counsel Chris Marchese said in a statement.
The two lobbying groups also represent Facebook, Google and Twitter. The latter is undergoing its own censorship conundrum, as Elon Musk has made it a central talking point in his planned takeover.
Tech companies and policymakers have long clashed on social media censorship—a similar law was blocked in Florida last year, though Governor Ron DeSantis still hopes it will help in his fight against Disney. In the wake of the 2021 insurrection in the capital, Democratic lawmakers urged social media companies to change their platforms to prevent fringe political beliefs from gaining traction.
Conservative social media accounts like Libs of TikTok have still managed to gain large followings, and a number of right-wing platforms have grown from the belief that such sentiments lead to censorship.
Having citizens enforce new laws seems to be Texas’ latest political strategy. A 2021 state law allows anyone to sue clinics and doctors who help people get an abortion, allowing the state to restrict behavior while dodging responsibility.
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Rivian Issues R1T Electric Truck Recall for Faulty Airbag Sensors
David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
According to a filing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Rivian’s sensor in the R1T may fail to turn the airbag off when a child or child seat is present on the front passenger side. This could result in airbags deploying and harming the child in a crash. The Irvine-based EV company is reportedly handling the problem by swapping out the defective seats for new ones at service centers. The issue is fully covered under warranty, Rivian says, but until a seat can be swapped, the company recommends keeping children out of the front seat entirely.
Rivian has had a rocky road so far in 2022, with supply chain issues and a massive stock slide causing numerous headaches as the automaker tries to ramp up production. A vaguely positive earnings call last week and good news about a new factory in Georgia suggests that the company may be close to turning the corner. And while annoying, this recall shouldn’t be a major problem for the automaker.
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David Shultz is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, California. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside and Nautilus, among other publications.
Venture Deals in LA Are Slowing Down, And Other Takeaways From Our Quarterly VC Survey
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
It looks like venture deals are stagnating in Los Angeles.
That’s according to dot.LA’s most recent quarterly VC sentiment survey, in which we asked L.A.-based venture capitalists for their take on the current state of the market. This time, roughly 83% of respondents reported that the number of deals they made in L.A. either stayed the same or declined in the first quarter of 2022 (58% said they stayed the same compared to the fourth quarter of 2021, while 25% said they decreased).
That’s not hugely surprising given the sluggish dynamics gripping the venture capital world at large these days, due to macroeconomic factors including the ongoing stock market correction, inflation and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While startups and VC investors haven’t been hit as hard as public companies, it looks like the ripple effects are beginning to bleed into the private capital markets.
Image courtesy of Hagan Blount
In addition to slowing deal volumes, most investors said they’re seeing startup valuations lose momentum, as well: Roughly 81% said valuations either stayed the same or decreased from the previous quarter, with nearly 39% noting a decline.
Should that sentiment continue moving forward, it could spell bad news for startups as far as raising the money they need for growth, investors said.
“If I was a startup right now, I would be making sure I have plenty of runway,” said Krisztina ‘Z’ Holly, a venture partner at Good Growth Capital. “When it looks like there's some potential challenges ahead in the market, it’s good to fill your war chest.”
Among VC respondents, about 86% said they believed that valuations in the first quarter were too high—one potential reason why deals slowed down in the first quarter, according to TenOneTen Ventures partner Minnie Ingersoll. She noted that L.A.’s growing startup scene features more early-stage ventures, whose valuations haven’t come down the way later-stage startup valuations have.
“I would say we are just more cautious about taking meetings where the valuations are at pre-correction levels,” Ingersoll said. “We didn’t take meetings because their valuations weren’t in line with where we thought the market was.”
While most respondents said the Russia-Ukraine war didn’t have much impact on their investment strategies, some 22% said it did have an effect—with one VC noting they had to pass on a deal in Russia that they liked.
Is There a Flight Out of Los Angeles?
Los Angeles was heralded as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the U.S. at the beginning of the year, behind only San Francisco and New York. Yet nearly one-third (31%) of VC respondents said that at least one of their portfolio companies had left L.A. within the past year. It won’t come as a huge surprise that the city of Austin, Texas has been one of the prime beneficiaries of this shift—with roughly half of those who reported that a portfolio company had left L.A. identifying Austin as the destination.
The tech industry’s much-hyped “exodus” from California has been widely reported on, especially as more companies have embraced the work-from-home lifestyle and also opted to move their operations to lower-cost cities and states. Most notably, Elon Musk has recently moved two of his companies, electric automaker Tesla and tunnel infrastructure startup The Boring Company, from California to Texas (with both of those firms moving in and around Austin).
“In today's competitive market with lots of capital to invest, we think the next generation of successful VCs are going to be diverse in markets (not just Silicon Valley)... [and] have access to undiscovered founders from everywhere,” said one survey respondent.
NFTs Aren’t Popular With VCs—But Web 3 Is
“It’s the future,” according to one respondent. “Buckle up and get on board.”
Are NFTs...
More than 71% of VC survey respondents said they were bullish on Web3—the new blockchain-enabled iteration of the internet, which promises decentralization and a whole range of applications involving cryptocurrencies, NFTs, DeFi and more. It’s the same sentiment informing Santa Monica-based VC firm M13’s new $400 million fund, which considers Web3 a core piece of its investment thesis.
In Q2 2022, do you expect your portfolio companies to:
L.A. is home to an ever-growing cadre of Web3-focused startups operating across the realms of finance, entertainment and other industries. But while local investors are willing to pour money into blockchain-related ventures, one segment of the space continues to evoke skepticism: Only 18% of respondents would describe NFTs as “a good investment,” while 33% thought they were “bad” investments and 39% said they were unsure.
As in our last survey several months ago, it appears that NFTs continue to divide opinion, with respondents expressing differing perspectives on their value and utility. One referred to them as “get rich quick schemes,” but added that the art pieces and social communities that emerge from them may be valuable. Another said that “NFTs as a digital medium are a legitimate thing”—but noted the vast majority are “awful investments with no intrinsic value.”
Graphics courtesy of Hagan Blount.
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.