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Dina Burkitbayeva
CEO of Freedom Biosciences / Harvard MBA / ex-McKinsey and JPMorgan
Dina Burkitbayeva is a highly educated and accomplished individual with a diverse academic background. She pursued her Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the prestigious Harvard Business School. Additionally, she studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at the University of Oxford during her Junior Year Abroad (JYA) program. She also holds a B.S. and B.A. in City & Regional Planning and Economics from Cornell University. Furthermore, Dina expanded her skill set by studying Coding for Managers, which included HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby on Rails at Product School. Her academic pursuits also include working towards a PhD in East West Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Highlights
As a proud Yale spin-out, Freedom Biosciences team and I were very happy to be back at Yale last week. It was even more awesome to participate on “The Psychedelic Renaissance” panel and learn from my panelists.
Yale is one of the leading institutions in ketamine and psychedelic therapeutics research. Almost 25 years ago John Krystal, Rob Berman and their collaborators showed that ketamine was an antidepressant in humans in a Yale study (Berman et al 2000). This was a pivotal study, discovering the fastest acting antidepressant (ketamine can work within hours vs multiple weeks for oral antidepressants). This discovery led to JnJ’s esketamine SPRAVATO program ($1b+ ARR drug for Treatment Resistant Depression and Patient with Imminent Risks of Suicidality) and 600+ ketamine clinics industry across the US. This discovery was also life changing for millions of patients who struggled with severe untreatable depression and suicidal behavior.
Yale Ventures

Fourth (!!!) psychedelic therapeutic gets FDA Breakthrough Designation. MindMed's LSD for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) follows Johnson & Johnson's SPRAVATO, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) MDMA for PTSD and Compass Pathways Psilocybin-assisted Therapy for Treatment Resistant Depression (TRD). The FDA continues to support the development of psychedelic therapeutics in a meaningful way.
"The FDA grants breakthrough therapy designation to expedite the development and review of therapies for severe or life-threatening diseases where preliminary clinical evidence shows that therapy may provide substantial improvements over available treatments."
