Article content

Sixty-five people work in the building, but apart from a couple offices and rows of desks, it’s still mostly empty.

Rows of cubicles wait for workers and a warren of laboratories is filled with untouched scientific equipment. A bio-processing and extraction plant across the street is still a construction site. Cameras in the ceiling watch as nothing much happens.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Medical cannabis veteran hopes to have 'transformational impact' on health care Back to video

Brent Zettl expects the place to look dramatically different in a year or so, once his second medical cannabis company is producing 50-millilitre bottles of oil and working toward clinical trials for the cannabinoid pharmaceuticals it hopes to develop.

Described by his employees as a visionary and the godfather of Canadian medical cannabis, Zettl founded CanniMed Therapeutics Inc. — the country’s first licensed medical marijuana producer — which was acquired in 2018 for $1.1 billion.

Three days later, he started Zyus Life Sciences Inc., a company he hopes can have a “transformational impact” on medicine by proving the usefulness of cannabis-based drugs in treating the symptoms of a whole host of diseases and conditions.