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FREDERICTON — Yang Qu hopes to lead the way in unlocking the full potential of cannabis — both commercially and medicinally — just as he did as one of Canada’s foremost anti-cancer drug researchers.

The 35-year-old will soon be the country’s first academic researcher focused solely on the cannabis plant.

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“Legalization just liberated the research on this plant,” said Qu, who will start in January at the University of New Brunswick.

There are still a lot of things we don’t know about cannabis, he said.

“The industry is rapidly growing, as we all know,” said Qu. “I’m sure that the exciting biological activities in the future that we would gather from this plant would help to grow the industry.”

Qu said one of his major goals is to look into the medical capacity of cannabinoids and devise new ways of manufacturing them.

While there are more than 90 different types of cannabinoids — chemical compounds in cannabis — he said we only really know about two of them: tetrahydrocannabinol, the primary psychoactive compound in the plant, and cannabidiol, a compound typically used for pain relief.