LSD Has 14 Patents in Our Tracker. The Company Closest to Approval Owns One.

A company-by-company look at the smallest patent footprint of any compound on our tracker — and why Definium, the company furthest along in trials, barely shows up in it.

LSD sits dead last by pending applications in our patent tracker — 14 granted, 34 pending, the smallest active pipeline of any compound we track, behind even MDMA. We've already broken down psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT from the same TREA pull. LSD's numbers are thinner for a specific reason: its basic chemistry stopped being anyone's property decades before most of today's filers existed.

The Original Patent Ran Out in 1963

Albert Hofmann and Arthur Stoll filed the first LSD patent in 1944; it issued to Sandoz as US Patent 2,438,259 in 1948. By 1963 the last of Sandoz's production patents had expired, and LSD's core composition of matter has been open prior art ever since — free for anyone to reference, impossible for anyone to re-claim. Sandoz stopped making the drug entirely in 1965, citing public health concerns. Everything filed since is downstream of that: nobody today can patent LSD itself, only a specific salt, formulation, delivery method, or way of measuring it.

Who's Actually Filing

Company	Compounds Covered	Granted	Pending	Est. Expiration
Compass Pathfinder Limited	Psilocybin, LSD	13	21	2039–2044
Universitätsspital Basel	Psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT	4	12	2041–2042
Roche Holding AG	LSD (immunoassay only)	5	0	2017–2026 (expired/expiring)
Terran Biosciences	Psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT	2	13	2043
Definium Therapeutics	LSD	1	18	—

Compass Pathfinder Limited (Nasdaq: CMPS) holds the largest combined total tied to LSD: 13 granted, 21 pending. That figure is shared with psilocybin, though — the same Polymorph A crystalline-form claims that anchor Compass's psilocybin portfolio — and our data doesn't break out how much of it is LSD-specific versus mention-level overlap in a broader filing.

Universitätsspital Basel, home to Matthias Liechti's clinical pharmacology lab, holds 4 granted and 12 pending spread across five compounds including LSD — the broadest academic footprint in our whole dataset, same as we found covering 5-MeO-DMT. As with that piece, there's no drug candidate attached; Basel's output is the pharmacology and dosing literature much of the rest of the field cites rather than a program moving toward an NDA.

Terran Biosciences holds 2 granted and 13 pending, also spread across five compounds. Terran's actual strategy is public and specific: it patents novel salts, polymorphs, and prodrugs of the classic psychedelics, LSD included, so that once a branded version of a drug reaches approval, its own follow-on version can enter without infringing — the generic-drug playbook, applied preemptively to a field that doesn't have branded originators yet.

The Patents That Aren't Trying to Treat Anything

Roche Holding AG (SIX: ROPC / OTCQX: RHHBY) holds 5 granted LSD patents and zero pending — all already expired or expiring this year. They aren't therapeutic patents at all. One, US 6,063,908, covers "reagents for lysergic acid diethylamide immunoassay" — a way of detecting LSD and its metabolites in a lab sample, not a way of dosing a patient with it. Roche's filings exist to support drug testing, the same category we found Randox Laboratories occupying for MDMA in our first patent piece. It's a reminder that not every name on a psychedelic patent list is betting on a therapy.

The Outlier: Definium

Definium Therapeutics (Nasdaq: DFTX) — renamed from MindMed in January, its LSD compound renamed from MM120 to DT120 in the same move — is, right now, the most clinically advanced LSD program that exists. DT120 posted a positive Phase 3 result for generalized anxiety disorder in August, on top of an earlier positive Phase 3 readout in major depression, and carries FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation for GAD. Per the same TREA pull behind our tracker, Definium holds exactly 1 granted US patent against 18 pending applications — proportionally the thinnest granted position of anyone mentioned here, on the compound furthest along toward an actual FDA filing.

That's the same asymmetry we found with GH Research and 5-MeO-DMT: the strongest clinical data in the compound class sitting on almost no issued patent protection. It isn't necessarily a weakness. A company this close to an approval is closer to competing on trial data, physician relationships, and regulatory exclusivity than on patent walls — the walls matter more in the years before you have those other things.

The Pattern

Take LSD's history out of it and the four approaches here are the same ones showing up compound after compound in this series: an academic lab publishing openly with no commercial position (Basel), a company building a defensive moat out of chemistry variants rather than the molecule itself (Terran), a company that picked up broad claims almost incidentally to a bigger psilocybin bet (Compass), and a clinical leader that has mostly chosen not to compete on patents at all (Definium). What's specific to LSD is that nobody had the option of owning the underlying compound to begin with — the Sandoz patents took care of that six decades ago. Every filing since has had to find something narrower to claim.

This is business and regulatory reporting, not medical advice. DT120 is not FDA-approved; no compound discussed here is approved for the indications mentioned.