Canadian Lawyer

November 2022

The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers

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www.canadianlawyermag.com 33 company is headquartered in Toronto but has a research and development lab in the US. "One of the risk factors we have is that we're constantly having to look at interna- tional law because we have employees in various states and provinces," says Robert Mino, general counsel and IP counsel at Cybin – a developer of proprietary psyche- delic therapeutics. Intellectual property protection pres- ents another challenge for lawyers in the psychedelics space. "Looking toward the return on invest- ment, obviously protectable intellectual property rights provide significant opportu- nities," says Mino. Data exclusivity is also an important consideration. Mino says that while a patent conveys the right to exclude others from using, making, selling or importing an invention, data exclusivity prohibits the jurisdiction's drug regulators from approving competing versions of a recently approved drug during the exclusivity period. He recommends that legal departments work with research teams from the earliest stages to start thinking about patent rights and data exclusivity. Lawyers are often heavily involved in innovation at biopharmaceutical companies. The legal department at Cybin works with the R&D department to stay close to discus- sions about clinical trials. It also works with development teams as they conduct preclinical studies. The opportunity to work on innovations at Psygen has been gratifying for Wood. "As an IP lawyer and a regulatory lawyer who has focused so much on cannabis and psychedelics, to be working in-house with a company where there's a high likelihood of unintentional innovation, as well as a plan for deliberate innovation, is very exciting," says Wood. Mino anticipates considerable consolida- tion in the industry as smaller players that struggle to find the resources necessary to survive inevitably merge with or are acquired by larger companies. "A lot of those companies will start to look at the intellectual property they have and the assets they have and try to merge with another company that may have the resources to continue to move forward," says Mino. "We are certainly looking at opportu- nities to merge with other companies that "I'm a big believer that psychedelics are going to become one of the most dominant cultural and medical forces of our lifetime" Ronan Levy, Field Trip Health may have assets of interest to us." Wood is optimistic that the future will be bright for the psychedelics sector of healthcare. "Psychedelics is a significant disruptor to the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry because it really changes how each of those happens," he says. "Once MDMA can be prescribed, which should be in 2023 or 2024, I think acceptance for psilocybin therapy will skyrocket."

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