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But they’re at least two years away from being able to achieve that level of yield. Chen says his lab is still at an R&D stage, producing a few grams of CBD at most.

It is absolutely inevitable that synthetic cannabinoids are going to become a large part of the cannabis industry David Elsley, chief executive of Cardiol Therapeutics

In mid-April, Willow Biosciences Inc., a small Calgary-based startup became the first Canadian biosynthetic cannabinoid company to go public. Willow listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, and raked in $30 million in the process.

“We had been doing synthetic biology formulations from medical plants for a really long time, and we were the first to reach commercial scale with our production of a synthetic opioid pharmaceutical derived from the genome sequence of the poppy plant. So we’ve been in the API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) space for quite some time now,” said Trevor Peters, the company’s CEO.

What Willow is now experimenting with in relation to the cannabis plant is similar to what Hyasynth is doing — manufacturing a variety of cannabinoids in a lab using yeast. But yeast isn’t the friendliest microorganism to deal with, creating a variety of scale-up challenges for Peters and his team.

Photo by Christinne Muschi for National Post

“Plants have evolved over time to fight off things like yeast, so the yeast cell tends to spit out what you’re trying to put in it. Where the real yield improvement comes in is when you can come up with a formulation that can fool the yeast into thinking that it is not a plant cell or plant gene that is being put into it,” explained Peters.

He says Willow is about two years away from being able to produce CBD in bulk, but no earlier. “I have seen a lot of forecasts that say companies are going to be ready by the end of 2019, and we’re going to be able to disrupt cannabis cultivation altogether and I think that’s probably a bit aggressive.”