‘Cellular Agriculture’ Could Be the Future of Cannabis - Leafly

‘Cellular Agriculture’ Could Be the Future of Cannabis - Leafly
‘Cellular Agriculture’ Could Be the Future of Cannabis - Leafly
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Leafly.com has published an article looking at "the future of cannabis": cellular agriculture.

We've previously featured Biosynthesis as a process that could unlock the whole potential of the cannabis plant, and InMed Pharmaceuticals (CSE: IN) (OTCQB: IMLFF) CEO Eric Adams had this to say in the article:  

Cellular agriculture, like biosynthesis more broadly, also suits pharmaceutical companies that “need purity in these products,” said Eric Adams. Adams is the CEO of one such company, InMed Pharmaceuticals, based in Vancouver, B.C. The process “lets us control these rare cannabinoids and make them pesticide-free.”

Read below to learn more about the potential of cellular agriculture. 

FROM LEAFLY (excerpt):

During a discussion at a New York conference in October, Kevin Chen described something so esoteric, so innovative within the cannabis industry, that New Scientist later published a story about it.

'Cellular agriculture will be much more efficient than growing plants.'
Kevin Chen, President of Hyasynth Bio


What Chen described was cellular agriculture, which uses genetic modification to craft products with certain amounts of specified cannabinoids. Proponents have been applying this process elsewhere to uncured meats, while innovators within the cannabis industry espouse another potential target: to efficiently develop products rich in THC, CBD or other cannabinoids, tailored to treat medical conditions and serve the recreational market with reliable, consistent ingredients.

The cannabinoid CBDV (cannabidivarin) has particularly received attention recently for its potential to treat patients with epilepsy, for example, via cellular agriculture. Traditional cannabis farming cannot yield enough CBDV, experts say, but cellular agriculture could.

“There’s enough groups working on this now that cellular agriculture is going to have a big role in this industry,” said Chen, president of Hyasynth Bio, a Montreal company that conducts cellular agriculture primarily for medical cannabis product development. “It is going to be that much more efficient than growing plants.”

Using Chunks of Cannabis DNA

Cellular agriculture is a nuanced, complicated process. Defined by New Harvest (which held the October conference to discuss and promote cellular agriculture) as “the production of agricultural products from cell cultures,” experts compare cellular agriculture to the decades-old process of creating insulin.

Cultivators take the DNA of a specified cannabinoid and recreate it in a different form. To cultivate CBDV, for example, Hyasynth “added the chunk of cannabis DNA that codes for CBDV into yeast DNA, which turns the yeast into CBDV production plants,” reported Canna News.

“We have been working on [cellular agriculture] for three or four years, and it’s generally quite difficult,” Chen said, citing high risk factors and variable techniques with experiments — as well as “a lot of genetic modification.”

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