It has been VERY long time since we have done anything on social media, and I figure that now is as good a time as ever to talk about our progress.

Fluffy stuff will come at the end.

People first…

We are 17 staff now and have added a few more advisors to our roster. Two in particular we’re excited to tell you about are Gabor Forgacs and Eugene Yosher.

Gabor Forgacs is a cofounder and CSO at Modern Meadow. He’s founded multiple biotech companies and has grown his most recent company over the years to take the same kind of ideas as we’re working on, but to disrupt the leather industry. Gabor sits on our board and his advice and experience has been invaluable.

Eugene Yosher is our newest scale up and manufacturing guy. He has spent the past 16 years at start ups and biotech companies running fermentation, and building facilities up to 20,000L in volume. He knows the practical ins and outs of GMP manufacturing and the challenges of tech transfer and scale up. He joined our team in December and we have a great set of opportunities lined up for our next scale already.

Our latest advisory board members prefer to keep their support confidential, but they are experts in metabolic engineering and have built up some of the biggest companies in synthetic biology today. They’ve already had a huge impact on our scientific pipeline.

What have we been up to?

This video was put together by the amazing people at Organigram with designs and animations from the equally awesome people at Pixels And Plans.

The short answer is a lot. We’re building relationships through all parts of the industry. It’s customary for us to keep much of this information confidential until these relationships become public, like the deal we closed with Organigram last September.

Our primary goal for this industry is to make things look more like what we see in pharmaceuticals and food/beverages. Right now, cannabis is in short supply (in Canada). It’s also not always up to the quality standards that’s necessary for ingredients in food or medicine. Fermentation is scalable and proven in industrial settings, which is why we’ve made it our goal to use this technology to make the cannabinoid industry better.

We want to see large pharmaceutical companies build supply chains with us that millions of patients can count on.

We want to see global food and beverage companies make big plays in this industry with our help.

And, we want to see small cannabis startups or artisans scaling unique products across the country, or even around the world, without having to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in growing plants.

If you work in these industries and have an interest in entering the cannabinoid industry, we would love to help make that happen. (Those submissions go directly to me, for now)

But, let’s talk a bit about science…

It is the season of competition, and it seems like everyone is jumping in the pool with us. Big names in academia like David Baker and Jay Keasling, as well as bigger names in industry like Ginkgo Bioworks who got hired by the Cronos Group, Intrexon, and Amyris, have all announced their work in cannabinoids. The new competition adds some positive pressure to our work, but it is a pleasure to see so many of these labs start entering this space.

In our labs, we’ve scaled up. Our throughput and speed have grow exponentially. We set aggressive timelines for ourselves and can clearly see the light at the end of our R&D tunnel, where we start manufacturing product. Despite my own excitement, we have to keep quiet about most of our work for now. But, we are always happy to see more work being published in this industry which consistently seems to be a good distance away from what we’ve been able to achieve (but we are always nervous and watchful).

Regulators have also been awesome.

We haven’t pointed it out yet, but some others are starting to talk about this. Every time that we have had a call or exchange with the government, it usually leads to more questions and challenges from us. Health Canada is not lazy, and we keep them busy. Since the updated regulations from Health Canada in October, a lot has changed, and we have a clear route to market here. There are still many challenges ahead, but if you have any friends or family that work at Health Canada please tell them, from me…

“Thanks, you’re fantastic, keep up the great work”.

Next, we are looking forward to the next phase of legalisation here which will allow a wider range of products to be sold, and open up even more opportunities for us.

Fluffy stuff

It’s been 5 years since we started this company (almost to this day).

We’ve been through 3 rounds of funding. We’ve filed multiple patents (with many more to come). We’ve raised a total of close to 12M$. We’ve dealt with hundreds of failures, missed payrolls and surfed couches to help get us to where we are today. We built out an amazing lab and great team.

Today, we’re in the best shape that we have ever been. And you can certainly expect to hear more from us soon.

Missing in this photo are Shoham and Eugene, which maybe works out since it would have been hard to fit a few more people. :)

Bye for now!

Kevin