Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brainforest Cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Alicia Holloway is a data scientist and population geneticist with expertise in genomics and statistical analysis of big data. She held an assistant professor appointment at UC San Francisco School of Medicine, where she was the founding director of the Gladstone Institute's bioinformatics core facility.
She earned a PhD focused on molecular evolution at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently, she joined a private corporation, Phylos, a cannabis genetics company that empowers growers of all sizes to produce the highest quality cannabis in the most cost effective way.
Phylos supports commercial scale cultivation with the industry's first production ready seed premium, phenotypically stable, fully feminized f one hybrid seed lines that deliver exceptional flower quality, potency, vigor, and yield. I expect that Alicia will be explaining some of that to us in this conversation.
Bylos also leverages its proprietary patent pending technology to provide partners with unparalleled rare cannabinoid genetics. It creates natural, safe, and effective ingredients under its natural, natural brand, utilizing its cultivation, extraction, and formulation expertise. Natural natural THCV varieties power a high quality supply chain of naturally derived THCv.
It's my pleasure to welcome Alicia to the brain forest cafe.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Hi, Dennis. Happy to be here today.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Okay, so thank you for coming on. I've been looking forward to this since I visited your facility earlier this year and you were not there. Unfortunately, we were not able to connect at that time, but a very impressive infrastructure and situation that you have there. So I was pleased to get the. The tour.
And are you? Well, let me ask you this. What made you decide to leave academics and these positions that you held in bioinformatics sound like they were pretty high profile and interesting. What led you to abandon academics and devote your life to cannabis genetics? I guess that's a place to start.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: Thank you, Dennis. Yeah, I loved the work that I was doing at UCSF and the Gladstone really trying to understand the genetic basis of disease and using very large datasets to do that. It was really rewarding, but we wanted a little greener life in a couple ways, and loved the idea of moving to Portland and living in Oregon. And we're excited that cannabis was becoming legal, and so we decided to make the move to Portland. And I started thinking hard about how I could contribute to cannabis and make a difference in people's lives, hopefully with medicines, and also appreciating cannabis as a recreational target as well, substance as well.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Right, right. So you were kind of an enthusiast about cannabis before you moved to Portland, and you decided you having the tools and the training and so on.
How did you get involved with Phylos?
What is your role there exactly? And are you the research director, or you have a research group that you're managing, or what's the day of the life of Alicia? Work at Phylos?
[00:04:44] Speaker A: It's evolved over time.
When I got connected to Phylos back in early 2015, I was really starting to understand that I could bring the skills and background that I had to cannabis. And there's been a fair amount of research on cannabis over time, even though it's been really hard to do. But with all of the new genomics tools that are available, we could start to understand cannabis diversity and how it produces different cannabinoids, or can be used for fiber or any of its many other uses. So we can really apply all of the crop sciences that we have developed over the past, gosh, 2030 years to cannabis and really make some big leaps in understanding and development of the plant. So my role at Phylos has evolved over time. We really started with a very strong focus on R and D, and building the tool sets that we're still using today, took a deep dive into understanding cannabis genetic diversity and assembling a genome so we could make comparisons between cannabis varieties. And then after we built that tool set, we shifted more into breeding plants. And with that, my role evolved into leading a little bit more diverse team, diverse skill sets. And I'm now the chief scientific officer at Phylos, and I lead the R and D teams where we do discovery. We're understanding how the plants make the compounds that they make, what's involved in, the color of the flowers and the structure of the plants, and then also applying that into breeding the plants so that they're better resistant to disease. They produce significant amounts of rare cannabinoids. They have really great agronomic traits for growers. And so it's, you know, it's been nine years now in cannabis, and it's really rewarding to see that initial foundation really turn into plants that customers are appreciating and getting to grow and experience.
[00:07:11] Speaker B: So when you talk about the skill sets of that, you apply to this, the technology, I take it, one that must be big, is sequencing. You can sequence these different strains, and you can see where the genes related to biosynthesis, for example, of this interesting THCV is, which I understand, not all varieties produce that. That's kind of a rare critter in the cannabis biosynthetic pantheon, you might say. Do you use the things like crispr? Or are you making. Are the strains that you're making, uh, would you call them, uh, GMO or not? They're. They're achieved through very intelligent breeding. Right. It's. You're not making GMO cannabis, or are you? Or if you are, do you not want to admit it?
[00:08:08] Speaker A: Oh, I think companies should be very open about the methods that they're using.
We are selecting plants based on the natural genetic variation that they have. The plants that we are producing are not genetically modified. It's a process of identifying the parts of the DNA that will lead to the expression of a trait like THCV. And then once you know where that piece of DNA is, you can select plants for it so that the plants that you're growing will then make something like THCV. That's been such an exciting project to work on. I mean, I have thoughts about, historically, the diversity of cannabis and how it was probably really diverse in the cannabinoids and other secondary metabolites that it made. And then we went through a process of really focusing on THC potency, partially because we had to grow it in secret.
And that was a cannabinoid that was making a big difference for people who are consuming it. But partly because we weren't able to test for what all else was in there. So we were lucky enough to identify some plants that were making a small amount of THCV and then do gene discovery that helped us understand what genes are involved in making THCV. And we can take plants of different backgrounds that had, you know, one important part of the genome would help it make THCV, and then another plant with a different part and combine those together so that we could increase the amount of that rare cannabinoid. We've gone from 4% to 20% of the plant making tHCV. So that's been a really.
[00:10:04] Speaker B: So, effectively, you can use the tools that you have to kind of create these highly tailored strains. So it's a much more directed process. I mean, you can, you know, in the old days, you could just, as you said, people would breed for THC, and they're looking for high levels of THC. Your work is much more sophisticated than that. In fact, you can finely tune the cannabinoid profiles in these strains. Is that correct? I mean, you could make a strain that expresses THC, and the only THC, or primarily THC, THCV. I mean.
[00:10:48] Speaker A: Right. And that's been some of the work that we've done over the past four years is really understanding how you can change that ratio between THCV and THC. The early plants were making very small amounts of THCV, and we've been able to ratchet up that ratio so that now it's about a four or five to one ratio of THCB to THC. And it's really just the combination of different parts of the genome so that we can have an array of plants that will have different ratios for different end uses. And I really hope we can do that for all the different cannabinoids, because I can just see a wealth of uses for plants with different combinations or ratios of cannabinoids.
[00:11:39] Speaker B: And it's all natural. I mean, you've achieved this through breeding and very fine genetic genomic analysis of these things. If I said, if I'm a customer, which I'm not, if I were a corporation, they said, we want a strain of cannabis that's expresses THCV, CBD and THC, and the following ratios, 60, 30, and whatever the rest. I mean, different levels of expression. You could basically tailor that strain to those specifications. Is that right?
[00:12:19] Speaker A: In general, we are able to do something like that. There are some limitations on which cannabinoids would get expressed together and how you would need, what your expectations would be on which ones are expressed. But yes, that's the goal, is to have natural sources of different ratios of.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Cannabis strains are proprietary, obviously.
And what is the product? What do clients buy? The seeds of these engineered strains.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Right.
So naturally selected, no engineering except for in our brains. But we do have these available as clonal cultivars at this point. We've been focusing a lot on getting the ratios and high levels of these rare cannabinoids.
On the THC side, we do have seeds just like you would in tomato or other crops, where you can sow 1000 seeds and you get the same phenotype on all thousand plants. But the minor cannabinoid plants right now are as clonal cultivars. And as we see, adoption in the industry for plants of particular types will take those to seamgrown as well.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: I see, I see. So that's the palette that you work with these different strains. So you can take some unremarkable cannabis that maybe expresses THC and not so many other things, and you can tune it. You can tune it to produce exactly what you want. I think this is far beyond any other kind of.
I don't know the status of the art in, excuse me, commercial cannabis cultivation, but I think you're far ahead of what most companies are doing. Because they don't think in these ways, and they don't have people like you that actually know how to do this work.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Well, I'm really proud of the work that we've done and the team that we have. I think there are other people that are thinking this way about cannabis, and I really think that it's the future to diversify the products that are available out there to develop the plants that are stronger and less res. That are less susceptible to different diseases. So I think that even though cannabis breeding maybe behind other crops like tomatoes or something like that, we've got all these tools that we can apply, and so we can catch up really fast. So I think that over the next several years, we're going to be making some really great advances as an industry and what's available in the plants.
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Does your work extend to non cannabinoid secondary products as well? Is that something that you play around with for, like, disease resistance or things like that? Or maybe, what's the term? Gustatory properties, olfactory properties, right. Sort of thing. You could manipulate all of that.
[00:15:52] Speaker A: I love thinking about all the traits from ones that growers care about a lot to ones that consumers care about.
We can select for purple flower.
That's a trait that we've worked on. We have a focus on aroma. Right now. Aroma is really important, I think, not only for being appealing, but also there is some evidence that particular terpenes or other metabolites are useful for anxiety or different symptoms like that. So we have identified some genetic markers for different terpenes and are able to select for those in our plants as well. One of them is terpenoline, which gives plants a fresh, citrusy, sometimes a little gassy aroma. And we are able to select for and stabilize our parent lines so that we can have a very consistent hybrid that will have that aroma, that fresh citrus aroma.
[00:17:06] Speaker B: Interesting.
What kind of diseases do you have to worry about? What kind of diseases do you breed resistance for? Are these fungal pathogens or insects or all of the above, or how do you handle that?
[00:17:25] Speaker A: Right. And that's a big question. There are a lot of diseases that cannabis gets from fungal pathogens to viruses and viroids and everything lumps to eat cannabis. So.
So we've worked.
Right, so we've worked on some diseases, powdery mildew and botrytis. We do a lot of testing for HLVD to keep that out of our. Out of our garden and out of our seeds.
We have yet, we have not yet done any work on pests, but that's definitely an area that needs to be worked on, and hopefully we can get some university partners that would be willing to work on that with us.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Right. I would think because they can't all be grown in these highly controlled greenhouse environments sometimes, or would that be the intention that these things would.
They wouldn't be something you'd, you'd put outside, you wouldn't grow them as a crop, you'd grow them in greenhouses under all these controls. Is that how it would be done?
[00:18:45] Speaker A: I would love to see more cannabis grown outside and in open air greenhouse situations. Our greenhouse is, it's a high tech greenhouse, but it does have outside air. And so we do get things coming in. And I think it's going to continue to be important to do breeding work that will give resistance to different pests and pathogens.
And those things are really hard to study because you want to make sure that the plants are infected with whatever the pest or pathogen is, that it's present in high enough concentration that you would really see if a plant was susceptible or resistant. I think it's going to take working with probably university partners to have the facilities that will allow for isolation of plants under different treatments. So you could imagine you'd have an isolation where they apply, say, botrytis, and then another isolation where they have the same plants, but they don't apply botrytis. And then you look at which ones are susceptible and you can map what parts of the genome are contributing to that resistance to the fungal pathogen.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: Right. So you can look at the less susceptible guides. Then you can do the genetic thing, the genomic analysis, see which are the activated genes.
Is that how you'd approach that?
[00:20:21] Speaker A: That's right. That's right, yeah.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: So I am fascinated by this THCV work that you're doing. And it seems like, I mean, where is this THCV been in my life?
It seems like it has all the properties, all the desirable characteristics, and few of the undesirable characteristics of good old, ordinary THC. What is it? Delta eight.
So explain to me what is different chemically about THCV than from THC?
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Right. It's a very small difference. So you can imagine looking at a THC molecule, and it's got those three rings, and then it's got the little tail on the end of it. The only difference between THC and THCV is that for THC, that little carbon tail is five carbons, and in THCV it's three carbons. So you're thinking, why would that have a huge difference in the effects that you see. And both of those, THC and THCV, bind to receptors in the human body. And the difference is that THCV will activate the receptor because it's got a longer tail that can go in and flick on that receptor. The THCV will just sit there and the tail is too short to activate the receptor. So it's just occupying the site, but it's not activating.
[00:21:58] Speaker B: THC will occupy the receptor and activate. THC will activate the receptor.
[00:22:05] Speaker A: The opposite.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: What is an antagonist that wasn't agonist, as the pharmacologists would put it? Or is it more complicated than that?
[00:22:15] Speaker A: That's right. You put it exactly right. THC is an agonist, activates the receptor. THCV, an antagonist, just sits there occupying.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: The receptor, and yet it has this interesting effect. I mean, which is it's an altered state, but there's no brain fog. There's no.
But what is the psychological effect? I mean, basically, clarity.
There is no munchies. It doesn't induce the munchies.
What else? I mean, it sounds like a lot of people would appreciate this compound. It's very hard. I mean, I know I would. There are lots of things about THC or high THC strains of cannabis that certainly I like, but other things I don't like. You know, the way it makes you tired and hungry, basically, if you could get away from that. And then you've got some clinical trials on this, is that right?
[00:23:19] Speaker A: That's right. We did a clinical trial and we used a THCV plus THC gummy, and then compared that to a THC only gummy and then a placebo. And we found exactly what you described with the combined gummy. With the THCV plus THC and the THC alone, we saw that people were enjoying themselves. They had high levels of joy.
You got all of the benefits of what you would expect from THC, that kind of euphoria.
But then what we saw was that there was an increased appetite with THC, which we've all maybe experienced the munchies. But then when you compared that to the THCV gummy, that appetite increase was not there. So it's mitigating that appetite. And then, as you mentioned about feeling tired, we saw that there were three times more reports of fatigue when on the THC, only gummy, and almost no reports of fatigue when you added the THCV in there. So you're still having that euphoric, happy feeling, but the side effects are reduced with THCV.
[00:24:48] Speaker B: That sounds ideal. It sounds like something many people would. Would want, you know, to enjoy. I know. I mean, my own experience with TCV, where I knew what it was, was basically when I visited philosophy, they had bait pins with this high THC V strain. It was very different. You know, it was not like THC. It was. It was actually quite, quite nice. I'm. When. When can I go to my cannabis dispensary up here in Canada and get THCV in a vape pan or a gummy? Is that.
[00:25:30] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:25:30] Speaker B: How far are we from that?
[00:25:32] Speaker A: It's available now. I will share some information with you afterwards. But our partner, Organogram, has products on the market that have the same ratio. So that two to one ratio of THCV to THC available on the market.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: Yeah. So we'll put that on the podcast website. So if there is a place it can be ordered and what you're ordering is seeds, or you could actually order the extracts, the preparation.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Right. It's the products. There are gummies and vapes are either out or soon to be out, but we will definitely get some information and be able to put that in the notes of the.
[00:26:25] Speaker B: What about medical applications of some of these cannabinoids?
You did a clinical study, informal, maybe not too informal, maybe fairly well structured, but to evaluate the experience.
What were people's impressions to it? But have you considered, or are you doing, or can you talk about.
Are you doing any clinical studies related to. I'm thinking about things like cognitive and memory deficits, pain, that kind of thing. I mean, I would think some of these things would have a lot of promise in these areas.
[00:27:09] Speaker A: I agree. And more clinical work needs to be done. We are in conversations to do additional clinical trials and preclinical trials. I think that there's a lot of promise with other cannabinoids, CBG, CBC, CBDV, and then combinations of cannabinoids and also other secondary metabolites. So there's, you know, you start thinking about all the different cannabinoids and then other secondary metabolites, and it's a big field of combinations that could be tried to understand how to combat pain, inflammation, depression.
You know, I'm really excited about the work that's been done showing that CBC has, this has reduced symptoms of depression, that CBDV may be useful for dementia, maybe autism spectrum disorder, some really good signs for epilepsy, and then CBG, the mother of cannabinoids. I think that we're just starting to understand how useful that cannabinoid could be for pain, inflammation, and then certainly lots of skin conditions. So there's a lot of work to be done out there to really understand how we can use these different plant concepts.
[00:28:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it seems that there's an almost infinite amount of work to be done, all of this one plant or this one genus. But as your work shows that there are many, many different strains, there's incredible amount. So what do you find? What are the regulatory hurdles to doing this work? This plant is not legal, or it's legal in Oregon, but not, I mean, if you wanted to do, for example, a clinical trial for Alzheimer's, would you file with the FDA and file an INd and then try to carry it out, go through the usual channels or how? I mean, I think any clinical trial must be challenging, but you've got the additional issue that these things are prohibited some places and not other places. It complicates the matter, right?
[00:29:35] Speaker A: It does. And the trial that we did with THCV and THC was an IRB, so it had a review board that approved the protocol.
So it was a clinical trial, but it wasn't along the FDA path. So that is a whole other set of hurdles to move through. And we would partner with someone to move in that direction.
They require a level of experience and know how that's outside of my domain, and so I would really want to have a partner that was well versed in those processes for ourselves. I think we will probably pursue additional non FDA routes, and then products can go through standard health and wellness rec markets.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Okay, that's, that's very interesting.
So if I were to go to clinicaltrials dot gov, that's a site you're familiar with, I'm sure, and put in something like psilocybin, I'll get 50 trials, either in progress or done or whatever.
Will your work be listed through clinicaltrials dot gov, or is this completely under the radar?
[00:31:08] Speaker A: So far it is listed in clinicaltrials dot gov dot. I was so excited the day that I saw that it was actually listed. And we are wrapping up analysis. We've shared some of the early results. We're wrapping up analysis, and we'll be publishing the work so that it will be out there in the public. And then I also pledge to update clinicaltrials dot gov with the results.
One of the difficult things is that even though there are all of these trials that you can see when you go to clinicaltrials dot gov comma, sometimes the results don't get published. And we can learn just as much from a negative result as we can from a positive result.
[00:31:52] Speaker B: Sure. That's the point, right? That's how you do it. Yeah. Not everyone is successful, but that's how this is science. That's how it goes forward.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: That's right. That's how we don't repeat the same thing many times. That's not going to work out, and we make advances. So I'm going to put our results up there so that everybody can see them.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: Yeah. You're okay to share that kind of information. I mean, you must want. So where does the proprietary element come in? Because philosophy. They need to make a buckley. Right. They need to make a profit. Nothing wrong with that, as long as it's done ethically. So where's the boundary between what you share, what you publish, and what you keep close to the chest?
[00:32:43] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. That's a good question.
We breed the plants. So really what we do is license for the use of the genetics or we sell seeds. And those are the ways that we generate income. So by supporting trials like this, we get more knowledge out into the world, and hopefully we get other companies that are consumer packaged goods producers excited about a THCV product.
They want their cultivator to license our plant, and then that gets made into a product that's on the shelves. So that's what we're doing. We're helping to generate this knowledge base, which then comes back to us and the desire to use the plants that we've developed.
[00:33:38] Speaker B: Right, right. And how widespread are those products? I mean, they are available through companies that have licensed this license. The products are able to sell. I mean, how widely. What does the commercial landscape look like? I guess these would be strains that would be used in medical preparations.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Right. I would say in most state legal markets, we have partners that are cultivating THCV plants, so they're becoming widely available.
There's definitely been this shift in focus from THC is the only thing to really thinking about the diversity of other cannabinoids and what kinds of products can be developed. So that's pretty exciting.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: Right. Which is something that was not possible a few years ago, but with these genomic tools, then you can do this. Before, people would just. They could hybridize and develop THC strains. But then that's.
I mean, that's very crude. That's kind of like taking a sledgehammer to it.
You can engineer these strains for exactly what these constituents are, as well as some of the secondary products, which also affect at least the organoleptic qualities. Error, Roma. And so on.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: And.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: And as you pointed out, some of these terpoids, terpenes are also psychoactive, potentially anxiolytic and that kind of thing. So when you look into the clinical work that's going on with psychedelics, and, of course, most of the focus in that realm is either psilocybin or MDMA. But psilocybin is kind of emerging as the one with most of the clinical studies, and they apply different technologies like neuroimaging, and they can look at neural connectivity and some of these long term effects.
I'm not a neuroscientist. I only play one on tv once in a while. But they reorganize these connectivity networks on a global basis. Have you done any neuroimaging with some of these products, or do you see anything like that happening?
[00:36:20] Speaker A: We haven't done any. I am fascinated by that work, and I would love to have a collaboration where we use that kind of technology or to see someone do a trial or an experiment looking at, for example, post traumatic stress syndrome and how different cannabinoids could impact what's going on in the brain, I find it all to be fascinating. And I think that cannabis definitely, I would put it on the same field as psychedelics or MDMA and should be looked at in the same way.
[00:37:04] Speaker B: Right, right. Well, as we can tell anecdotally from people that have had post traumatic brain syndrome or TBI or some of these things, I mean, veterans seem to be a big population pool for this. They're at risk for this. And many veterans, you know, just anecdotally say, if it wasn't for cannabis, I'd be dead. You know, I mean, cannabis basically saved them in a certain sense, or was something that. That they felt was very helpful. And then that doesn't exclude psychedelics, which may have complementary effects. I mean, cannabis is certainly one medicine that is remarkable because it's so non toxic. I mean, you cannot, I would think, the risk of adverse events and so on would be much lower with cannabis. Although, as you know, where you're pharmacologist, all drugs have side effects, but some are worse than others.
[00:38:13] Speaker A: They do. And, you know, that's why it's important to do the proper clinical work, to really understand the safety beyond the efficacy, but understanding the safety of these. They're drugs. They're being introduced into our bodies, and so we really do need to understand them.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Right, right. And you're. And you're publishing all this pretty steadily. These results are coming out. And what journals are you?
Are you. What are your favorite journals to.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: I don't know if I have a favorite. I mean, you know, my background is in genetics and genomics, and so I really appreciate the pharmacology and understanding what's happening at the receptor level. And so I tend to read a lot in those areas, and they're published in a lot of different journals. I do appreciate the journals that have had a focus on cannabis because it's been an outlet for the research community to publish when maybe it wasn't as accepted to be working on cannabis. So I don't know if I have a favorite, but I definitely appreciate the diversity of work that's being done.
[00:39:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, all that's changing.
It's a tough road to hoe when you're working with substances that were so stigmatized before.
And we've seen this evolution happen with psychedelics, whereas a few years ago they were terrible, there was nothing good about them. And then basically, by the sheer force of the good science being done, particularly the clinical science, the perception has changed both publicly and in the biomedicine, in the medical sphere as well. They recognize that these things, or something like MDMA, similar, you know, they say, I mean, it has this reputation as a party drug, which it is, I suppose it's a party drug, but then it has all these benefits for PTSD and other, other types of things.
But it's very difficult. You, you probably are following maps's attempts, and they've had, you know, they recently had an FDA, it was not the approval committee, but it was a review of the evidence. That that was pretty rough for them. You know, a lot of the, a lot of the people on that review committee said, yeah, you're not ready for prime time yet. You know, that doesn't necessarily mean, as you know, that the FDA will feel that way. I mean, it's a whole different thing. But certainly they were very disappointed that these expert review. I think it was the expert review committee that was looking it over, and I think that's a problem that's plagued a lot of these studies with these formerly prohibited substances.
They, you know, there's a perception that the work is, the experiments are not well controlled. You know, I mean, that's. That is said over and over again. The sample sizes are small.
The placebo, it's very, you know, it's very hard to design a placebo controlled, double blind clinical study for a psychoactive drug.
You get the cohort, you know, part of the sample is rolling down the floor laughing, and the others are saying, looking at each other and said, I think we got the placebo.
[00:42:08] Speaker A: Yes. Very hard to have a placebo quite.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: That dramatic with cannabis, but you know what I mean.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I was actually surprised. I mean, not to get off the subject, but looking at the data from our trial where we had a placebo gummy, there was a cohort of individuals that just loved the sugar pill. They just loved that placebo, and they didn't like the cannabinoids. And these were participants that were asked upon screening, you know, the initial screening, if they were comfortable taking a certain amount of THC and what their use patterns were, if they were, you know, daily, weekly, monthly users. And these were cannabis users, but they.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Loved sugar pills, but they loved the sugar more than anything else, as we know. And there have been studies that sugar has, and lots of ways, many of the. Many of the addictive and reinforcing properties that any drug does. That's true to some of these other. All of these figures that basically punch the dopamine button and, you know, that's right. Definitely does that. So, yeah. What about analgesia? Are you doing that?
Clinical studies related to analgesia? I ask this from a personal point of view, because I have chronic muscle pain and muscle spasm. I'm looking for the miracle drug that will fix that.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: Yes, we are in conversations right now to do similar work for pain. It's. I mean, gosh, what do they say? 60 million Americans are suffering from some sort of pain. It's a huge number of people, and we can very likely have some natural medicines that will help with that. And so we're definitely looking at it. Others are looking at pain. And I would guess within the next couple years, we have much greater insight on whether it's a single cannabinoid or combinations that will be really useful.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Well, I want to track that, because I'll be happy to sign up for one of those trials. I'm very, very interested in that. Speaking of which, opiates and addiction in general, do you think any of these cannabinoids might have potential for treating addiction?
[00:44:44] Speaker A: Cool.
I think what we would really like to understand is if we can replace opioids with some cannabinoids, or if we can reduce at least the dosage that folks are having to take of opioids so that it reduces the addiction potential.
It's not my area of expertise, but I am thinking a lot about it. And especially when we're in conversations talking about clinical trials for pain, if we can either very quickly move people off of opioids or reduce their doses, we'd be in a much better situation.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it would make a big difference, that's for sure.
So in the medical side of things, this is all work. This work is you're contracting out with different university medical facilities. You're not doing this work at the Phylos facility, you're working with different institutions in different places. Is that how.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Different partners, definitely. We, you know, we have a greenhouse, we focus on the plants and then have partners for the medical work. Yes.
[00:46:14] Speaker B: Well, you're doing fantastic work. This is all very interesting. I don't know if I've asked the right questions, but what have I not asked that I should be asking?
[00:46:28] Speaker A: Oh, I don't know. I mean.
[00:46:31] Speaker B: I mean, you're the expert, so I've just kind of the interested student here.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: Yeah. I think the only thing that we haven't talked about is seed grown cannabis, and our focus as a crop sciences company is in treating cannabis like a crop so that you can grow from seed. You don't have to have mother rooms with clones for all of the cultivars you want to grow. And so we are spending a lot of effort to have a breeding program that will allow us to provide seeds that will be. Each variety will be consistent in the cannabinoids it produces, the harvest time, the yield, the height for harvesting.
I see that as definitely the place we want to get to with a lot of different cannabinoids. For now, we have THC seeds available, and we care a lot about the medical community and health and wellness, but to get there, we have to have plants that grow really well for the cannabis cultivators and producers.
[00:47:55] Speaker B: And then these are ultimately crops. How does this fit into, and are there potentially agricultural applications to these? Im thinking you could breed varieties of cannabis that are good to grow in multi crop situations to prevent pest infestations and that kind of thing. Some of these compounds are resistant to pests and might protect other crops growing adjacent. Is that a possibility? Are you looking into that?
[00:48:29] Speaker A: I haven't done any work on that, but I think it is. Intercropping or rotational cropping is really interesting. After you've grown a crop for three or so years in the same field, you start to see issues with.
With either nutrient deficiencies or pests, and if we can have good rotations or intercropping that rejuvenates the soil, I think, you know, I'd love for us to move in that direction.
[00:49:01] Speaker B: Right.
[00:49:02] Speaker A: Definitely a different side. The agronomists and those kinds of scientists would be.
[00:49:07] Speaker B: So cannabis is one of those plants. Its a wonderful thing because it covers so many different areas, ranging from ethiopatny to agronomics to genetics to neuroscience to medical applications. Its just one of those because theres so much inherent interest, so many potential applications. Its one of those sort of, there's just an infinite amount of investigation and discovery to be done with.
And that's just, this is just one plant, you know, or one plant.
[00:49:46] Speaker A: I agree.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Just a couple of genuses. Genera, yeah. As a geneticist, do you recognize, you know, back in the day, they used to make distinctions between cannabis sativa and cannabis indica? Court cases were argued on this, you know, but the current understanding is there's just one. Right. There's cannabis sativa polymorphic, many varieties, many strains. Cannabis indica is not a legitimate species. Is that how you understand it?
[00:50:25] Speaker A: That's right. That's what we see.
The most different plants are the fiber type plants, the hemp fiber type plants, and they're just a subpopulation of the rest of cannabis.
[00:50:40] Speaker B: Right. It's all the same. It's all about the genetic.
[00:50:45] Speaker A: It is. And we're really fortunate that we have such a diversity of cannabis still out there and available that we can do breeding with. It's been prohibited and underground on for so long and kept, that diversity was really kept available, and now we can start to work with it.
[00:51:10] Speaker B: Now you couldn't work on it out in the open. Yeah.
It never serves much to try to prohibit a plant, in my estimation, because it doesn't work. You know, look at coca. You know, you create an underground market for this product. And, you know, I'm interested in coca these days because it's in a similar position. You know, a plant that's been stigmatized because it's the source of cocaine. But non cocaine, coca leaf is a whole different medicine, and it's quite beneficial. And I think many of the same misperceptions apply to cannabis. You know, we love to demonize plants, you know, and like I sometimes say about chemicals, you know, often the, the conversation is directed at the drug as though it's the drug's fault. Cocaine is not a bad drug. It's just a shitty drug, but it's not the fault of the compound. It has the chemistry and pharmacology that it has, and it's up to people in terms of how they choose to use that. And much the same goes is true of cannabis.
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: Thank you so much.
Really enjoyed it.
[00:52:39] Speaker B: Didn't say that you want to be sure to say we've kind of covered it.
[00:52:44] Speaker A: I think we covered a lot of ground. I really appreciate your knowledge and your involvement in the industry, and I'm honored to have been on this podcast.
[00:52:56] Speaker B: Well, thank you. Yeah, we're honored to have you. I know a lot of our listeners will be really interested in this. And anything that you'd like to post on the site, any links to papers or anything, just send those to me and we'll make sure they get up there.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: Definitely do that.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: Thanks again. Thank you, Alicia. Have a wonderful weekend.
[00:53:19] Speaker A: Thank you. You, too.
[00:53:24] Speaker B: Join our mission to harmonize with the natural world. Support the Makena Academy by donating today.
[00:53:44] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to brain Forest Cafe with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna Academy.
