The American Psychiatric Association (ASA) found in a year-end 2021 study that “one in four Americans (26%) or more than 67 million adults” plan on improving their mental health in 2022.
Easier said than done after what we’ve been through as a people and a planet since 2020, calling for a stronger form of intervention than may be effective for someone else.
With clinical trials now underway studying psilocybin — the psychotropic substance in certain mushrooms and cacti — for its potential as a new class of antidepressant, Juan Pablo Cappello, co-founder at NUE Life Health, is pursuing something similar that’s already FDA approved.
Cappello told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, “Coming out of COVID, everyone I knew had been affected in some way or another in terms of their emotional and mental wellbeing. I began to think how we could help a million people address the root cause of their suffering and dis-ease before psilocybin becomes legal.”
That way is the drug ketamine, a powerful anesthetic found to have surprising positive impacts on mood and feelings, especially for those who don’t respond well to common antidepressants.
An attorney turned entrepreneur who grew up under a military dictatorship in Chile yet built and sold an early FinTech to Banco Santander by the 1990s, Cappello is on a mission.
A believer in indigenous healing, he said “understanding where we are as a society, I knew we would have to wait years to get there. I began to think we need to start leveraging some tools that we have our disposal today to help people address what they’re going through, their suffering, their dis-ease, their trauma, and that’s the journey we started.”
NUE Life is helping people achieve exactly that — a new life — based on a biochemical “reset.”
He told Webster “We’ve helped 3,500 patients to date. About a third of our patients come to us treatment resistant. That means they’ve tried at least two or three antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications and they haven’t had positive results or had negative side effects.”
Tracking patient progress on an opt-in basis through its app and its own on Knowledge Graphs, NUE Life can tell if ketamine patients are sleeping well, eating and getting exercise, and otherwise ensure that the treatment is having its desired effect.
“What we’ve created and are about ready to launch [is] a new score, a little bit like the way your Oura ring or wearables give you a score on your physical health, and if you’re promoting your wellbeing.”
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Graphing Your Mood
“My mother would always say that the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the quality of the questions you’re willing to ask yourself,” Cappello said.
As applied to NUE Life and its ketamine treatments, “The core question we asked ourselves was how do we lower the cost of therapy by 50%, 60%, 70% and maintain or elevate the standard of care? We come from a technology background. To do that you have to leverage technology.”
Knowledge Graphs help NUE Life patients get to recognize and understand their own state of mind and what’s influencing it, as the meds and technology work in concert.
He said “We really believe in the power of self-healing, that the body and the mind want to be in equilibrium. Unfortunately, life happens, trauma happens, social media happens. Things happen that knock us out of that balance and people, if they understand themselves better, can help get themselves back into balance without a lot of intervention.”
Visualizing this via Knowledge Graphs is proving an effective supplement in the therapy.
As we’re talking ketamine — a controlled substance that is abusable — NUE Life is stringent in its vetting of not only prescribing physicians but of the patients seeking this controversial care.
With four licensed physicians on staff and 19 being onboarded, NUE Life seeks “physicians who are very mission aligned with what we’re doing.” He added that “we’re very, very careful and selective about patients that we work with. Only about 8% of prospective patients [are brought] into our program. We realize that this is a powerful therapy that isn’t for everyone.”
Those accepted undergo a series of “generally six [90-minute] ketamine experiences in the comfort of their own home with a physical sitter — a friend, a colleague, a spouse — sitting with them.”
NUE Life finds this combination “helps somewhere over 80% of our patients get into a higher, more elevated mental place. Now the question becomes how do we keep them in that elevated mental place without necessarily offering them more ketamine?”
The simple answer is that NUE Life isn’t trying to create repeat customers. Cappello said the objective of ketamine for mental health is the psychological “reset” not the return.
“We’re not trying to substitute monthly or quarterly ketamine therapy for daily antidepressants,” he said.
“What we are trying to do is to use ketamine on the front end to help people get unstuck, and once they’re unstuck, help them stay unstuck as much as they can. If somebody does need to come back … that’s fine. We understand that, but that’s not our underlying business model.”
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A Medical Breakthrough?
Psychedelics curing depression may sound like a story from a Grateful Dead tour of yore, but there’s growing support in the medical community to use psychoactive substances for good.
NUE Life uses FDA-approved ketamine lozenges in an off-label fashion, which is common practice among physicians prescribing other drugs. There is always risk involved.
He said, “In the normal patient-doctor relationship, you go in, you see the doctor, they give you a prescription and you go home. There is no follow up with the doctor. We’re leveraging telehealth and following up with the patient in a real time way.”
“If the patient is giving us access to their Apple watch, their Whoop, their Oura ring, we can be getting passive data from the patient. Also, through the app we are able to check in with the patient.”
The company also employs standard measures used by psychiatrists, including the GAD-7 General Anxiety Disorder assessment, paired with wearables data and talk therapy.
Using a score gamifies the experience in a way, giving patients something to monitor and showing how various activities may improve (or worsen) their mental state.
“That’s what we’re trying to capture with the new score is giving our patients, in the next iteration of the app, a number they can focus on so they can see are they trending up, are they trending down? If we see they’re trending down, then we can recommend to the patient potentially more therapy, meditation, yoga, breath work, journaling, coaching,” he said.
Having “facilitated upwards of 35,000 ketamine experiences safely, effectively, and ethically and measured the outcomes” to date, Cappello said, “To keep the math simple, 1,000 patients might come to us treatment resistant. That means those patients have tried antidepressants and they’re really stuck. We’re able to help two thirds reduce their symptoms by 50%.”
For a course of treatment lasting one to four months, and with a NUE Care mental wellness aftercare program launching soon, Cappello and his investors see a medical breakthrough in the making.
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