Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Trudeau government plans to ""legalize, regulate, and restrict access to marijuana"". However, safe medicinal use of the pharmaceutical chemicals produced by this plant (cannabinoids and terpenes) must also be rooted in a scientific understanding of best practices. Despite cultivation for millennia, medical marijuana has been largely absent from modern scientific research programs. Therefore claims of therapeutic benefits and knowledge of how to produce the pharmaceutical compounds (cannabinoids) lags behind the legislation that allows medical marijuana use in Canada. This limits companies, like First Access Medical, in their development of industrial scale processes that reliably produce particular cannabinoids from plants. Our research proposes to contribute new knowledge of the molecular entities that control the production of one key cannabinoid, cannabidiol. To this end, we will compare protein and transcribed DNA profiles of marijuana cultivars that produce cannabidiol in high and low quantities. We will also create mathematical models that compare predicted cannabidiol profiles of cultivars with high and low quantities to those created in a careful plant breeding program. This new knowledge will allow FAM to sell new products, increase their market competitiveness and maintain high quality and standardized drugs for patients, predict practical yields, and evaluate clinical applications. This research will accelerate intellectual property development and thus create a new revenue stream for FAM. The capacity to predictably produce cannabinoids, the active ingredients in therapeutic products, could have profound medicinal and economic importance to Canada.