Marijuana Business Magazine July 2019

Marijuana Business Magazine | July 2019 10 Capitalizing on Canada’s First Nursery License The co-founder of InPlanta says company aims to meet demand for starting material in the consumer retail market and for large cultivators By Matt Lamers T he number of federal cannabis license holders in Canada continues to soar, as does the demand for more diverse starting materials. InPlanta Biotech- nology sees a business opportunity in that demand. The Alberta company recently won the first nursery license in Canada, allowing it to develop and sell genetics for seeds and clones. InPlanta plans to offer its “unique, vast collection” of genetics to business and home cultivators. “Ultimately, it’s going to open the market up to better stuff. It’s going to allow licensed producers to compete more with the black market,” co-founder Darryl Hudson said. Hudson—a molecular biologist—operates the com- pany with Igor Kovalchuk at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. “What this (nursery license) really does is it allows us to finally pay for it, without having to scrape by with grants. Me and my partner have been bootstrapping this for years,” Hudson said. Marijuana Business Magazine caught up with Hudson to talk about Canada’s first cannabis nursery license and the importance of patenting the medica- tion derived from a particular cannabis genetics—ver- sus the genetics itself. How do you plan to commercialize the nursery license? There’s a three-pronged approach. One is direct sales, one is royalties on unique and validated genetics, and the third is standard breeder’s rights. We provide standard genetics to businesses on a per- sale basis. You can patent unique genetics, but usually it’s better to patent the medication or the formulation coming off of the genetics, rather than trying to control the genetics itself. If you’re the only person that has (the genetics), and you keep it in-house, then it’s going to be hard to steal stuff and monetize it. At the end of the day, it’s about trying to control the formulations, like GW Pharmaceuticals has done, which is to mix a number of genetics together and have some- thing that would be very difficult to copy, even if they did have the genetics. How do you protect your intellectual property? Because we’re a molecular and DNA lab, we’re pretty good at doing the genome sequencing and knowing what we’re starting with. With any sort of plant IP at this point, that’s what you want to do: get the genetic code. You want to do a pretty deep genome sequence and not make Five Questions | Darryl Hudson You can patent unique genetics, but usually it’s better to patent the medication or the formulation coming off of the genetics, rather than trying to control the genetics itself.” —Darryl Hudson InPlanta co-founder

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