Marijuana Business Magazine July 2019

Marijuana Business Magazine | July 2019 12 that information public, because that’s what allows you to defend a patent down the road. I could go buy something at the store, take the DNA off it and say, “That’s mine.” There is an approach to patenting individual genetics, but it’s arduous and it’s going to be hard to enforce. Whereas, when you look at GW’s approach to patenting a medication, they start with a specific genetic. They know what that genetic is. They don’t let that genetic out. And then they patent the specific formulation coming off of the genetic, which is much easier to enforce. Are you looking for partnerships with large cannabis companies? We’ve been courted by most of the big players and just haven’t found the right fit to date. And that was because, primarily, these guys are just trying to figure out how to be farmers. So, for them to dictate what a genetics and breeding company was going to do didn’t make sense. Especially when a lot of the projects we work on are five to seven years to monetization. To tell that to someone in the cannabis industry, who wants to see a return in six to eight months to flip their stock, has been difficult. At this point, we’re actually going to be monetizing things ourselves. If it’s the right fit, it’s the right fit. Most of the LPs (licensed producers) in Canada are shifting away from cultivation to sales and marketing and productization. Most of them didn’t realize they were investing in being farmers. How does being on a university campus help your business? The partnership we have with the University of Lethbridge has been phenomenal. Not only does it allow us to do research in a high-level, professional atmosphere, but it really lets us bring all the science and technology that’s being used in other industries—for breeding corn and rice and everything else—to the cannabis space. We have export permits as well, which is going to make Canada not just a hub for the product but also a hub for the science and the distribution of the next wave of cannabis genetics. How did federal research build up your genetics inventory? We’ve had a research license for a number of years, and so we’ve made a number of acquisitions of genetics, and we’ve been breeding with those. We made a transfer from our research license to our nursery license, which is amazing, because the research license said, for cannabis, everything had to be destroyed in the end. This was a problem. We were part of the lobby prior to the Cannabis Act that asked to bring genetics in, to allow researchers to move genetics over, and Health Canada agreed. At the end of the day, if that didn’t happen, our entire industry would have been shackled, and we wouldn’t have been able to compete with the black market. Health Canada was smart to open those doors for genetics. We have a unique, vast collection: We have at least a few hundred hemp lines that we’ve worked on. We started with a few hundred cannabis varieties. What we do is we typically create hybrids. We have one growth chamber that we flower out. Every eight weeks or so, I’m pumping out 40 to 60 new hybrids. So far, we’ve just put them in the fridge, but now we can sell them. Matt Lamers covers the international cannabis market for Marijuana Business Daily . You can reach him at mattl@mjbizdaily.com . Molecular biologist Darryl Hudson co-founded InPlanta Biotechnology. Courtesy Photo Five Questions | Darryl Hudson