CANNABIS VILLAGE - Where do cannabinoids come from?
Chen, Kevin
Kevin founded a startup focused on opening up the potential of cannabis-derived medicine, by replacing plant growth with engineered microorganisms. His side projects include Bricobio - the DIY bio/biohacker/indie science community in Montreal - and he’s also a director of Helios Makerspace. Kevin will speak about his work hacking the genome of yeast to make it produce THC. Being that this process is more in alignment with current pharmaceutical practices and is able to scale much more effectively, he hopes this approach will enable many to explore the benefits of Cannabis-related medicine and products more consistently.
 Alright, I think I'll get started and tell you guys a bit about my work with engineering strains of yeast to produce various cannaminoids. My name is Kevin, I'm from Montreal, this is my first DEF CON and I'm enjoying it a lot. My background is primarily in biochemistry, but I am the CEO of Hyazinth and I do a lot of the fundraising stuff. And on the side I also do some biohacking and DIY bio sort of stuff, so I've been to hope another, I guess I've been to hope a couple of times and so I'm somewhat familiar with hacking things, but I'm not very good at any hacking stuff so hopefully today and tomorrow I'll learn something from you guys. A little closer to my, yes. So to get things started, I guess, I don't know if you guys were here for the rest of the day and saw the other talks, but maybe you got a bit of a primer about cannabis and how it grows and how to tell if it's sick or not or what the chemistry looks like. We had some fantastic talks earlier about that. I'm going to shift the focus away from maybe cannabis plant stuff and talk more about specifically the cannaminoids, which are the name for the active ingredients in cannabis. So like THC is one cannaminoid, CBD is another cannaminoid and there's about 100 others. And the basic question to start things off is like, where do they come from and also how much do they cost? Of course, most intuitive thing is to grow plants and to get THC and that's pretty good. And as far as costs go for growing plants, you guys, people who have done their own growing would know their own estimates, but I think if you had pure THC, maybe like $10 a gram kind of thing if you really want to like, you know, get your costs down. But anyways, plants are just one way of getting THC and as we saw earlier, you can also synthesize THC using chemistry and that's kind of what you would see in the middle image there is like a big chemical plant that's producing all this THC. I think that plant in particular is for some other pharmaceutical or antibiotic or something like that. But I'm here to talk about a third way of doing this stuff, which is to engineer strains of yeast to produce THC and other cannaminoids, which has its own set of advantages compared to chemistry and compared to growing plants. So it's a bit of an introduction to what this is all about. We're talking about biosynthesis here, which means that there are chemical reactions happening inside the plant cells that will take, you know, sugar all the way to something called olivotolic acid then to cannabidiolic acid and eventually to THC or tetrahedral cannaminoleic acid and CBD. And these chemical reactions are driven by enzymes, which are the molecular machinery of the cell and I don't know what kind of backgrounds people have in like biochemistry and stuff like that. But these enzymes are genes inside cannabis that you can cut and paste and move around if you wanted to. And so our goal is to kind of take these genes from cannabis, like those segments of DNA that are responsible for producing THC and put those into a strain of yeast. And then that yeast we can grow using just sugar and water and really big steel tanks that go up to hundreds of thousands of liters and have a really big like industrial scale kind of system for producing pure THC. That's a lot more efficient than chemistry and growing plants. What this looks like from I guess overview standpoint is that, you know, you're, when you're thinking about what a yeast is doing in its cells, it takes in sugar and it grows. That's what a yeast does and produces CO2. And or it produces ethanol if you want to make a beer or something like that. And our job as a metabolic engineers and genetic engineers is to look at this pathway and add on things that are going to get us to making something like a livetolic acid and eventually to THC. So this involves a lot of like changing around the genome of yeast and tweaking certain things and figuring out different ways to grow it so that it does optimize for production of THC. And in the simplest, you know, way of thinking about this, you know, we add three or four enzymes, you know, they convert from sugar to THC in the end and that's, you know, the easy like, you know, way to think about the problem. But and then if you want to make something like CBD, then you remove the THC producing enzyme and you add a CBD producing enzyme and then you're making CBD and CBD and THC. And this is one of the advantages of, you know, manipulating genetics that you can switch things on, switch things off, you control the stuff like a program. The challenge comes in as things get more complicated when you're talking about like a hundred different cannabinoids and all these other metabolites that get made alongside of it where it's not, you know, as easy as adding just three or four genes to a yeast and then you get THC out, you're going to be playing around with maybe hundreds of different genes and for us, you know, we've gone through hundreds, it's not thousands of combinations of different genes to optimize and to improve always on our yields and to try and get to different, producing different cannabinoids. And yeah, so that's kind of, you know, how we think about this stuff. And just to clarify one thing, I guess, we saw a bit of this earlier too. We're not thinking about synthetic cannabinoids at all. Like we're just interested in the ones that the plants make. You could possibly engineer yeasts to produce some of these synthetic cannabinoids, but there's not as much of like an interest in these things right now. So I don't usually use the word synthetic when I talk about what we do because people get sometimes confused about synthetic cannabinoids versus ones from plants and we're making the ones from plants but we're not growing plants in anyways. Yeah. All right. So after we've made cannabinoids and the question is, okay, where do we go? And this comes to, you know, talking about why we're doing this whole thing. As we would have seen earlier as well and probably because, no, like cannabinoids go into your brain, they react with your cannabinoid receptors and then you get, you know, the various effects like, you know, feeling high or having an appetite or whatever else and all kinds of different things or as Mark Lewis said this morning, maybe, you know, tweaking your entire personality apparently is part of this system. But it's, yeah, super interesting system to manipulate and there's all these different cannabinoids that are going to affect it and that's ultimately, you know, what we're working towards. And because cannabinoids do this, that means that we can use them to treat various diseases, whether that's for epilepsy or for mental health disorders like depression or anxiety, even glioblastoma has like, you know, late stage brain cancers has seen a lot of interesting results from using THC along with other cancer treatments. And then nausea, appetite loss during cancer therapy is another, that one is what, Marinal Holt that exists on the market right now is prescribed for and there's also another product called Satevex, that's cannabis extract, that's also a prescription drug. So a lot of newer cannabinoid stuff kind of points in that direction. So I guess out of these two, out of these four pictures, maybe the biggest ones are epilepsy, which is fairly new and then nausea, appetite and stuff is kind of the classical, you know, thing that people try to use cannabinoids for. And there's the famous story of Charlotte's Web and this whole thing where CBD is now like being used for treating epilepsy and there's a really interesting timeline where this stuff kind of came out in 2013 and then 2014, like the pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceuticals started their first trials of CBD with epilepsy and now it's as of a few months ago on its way to the market and approved by the FDA. And yeah, so when it comes to thinking about like why we're doing this, we're really interested in looking at different ways of producing THC and CBD and not just thinking exclusively about growing plants as like this has to be the all-end-all solution because it does take a lot of energy and time to grow plants. And if I think in terms of numbers, it's like, yeah, three months to grow plants and if you really want to get high levels of THC, then you have to grow indoors in a very controlled environment and have those like lighting energy and stuff like that. So it's really not that environmentally friendly or economical to grow THC in that method. And then with chemistry, you're working with petroleum-based compounds, you're having multiple different reactors and always interesting temperature controls and reagents have to go into that process and that also becomes quite complicated and can take weeks as well to do. But with yeast, it's more like you add sugar, you add water, you add the yeast, you wait a week, these grows up, then you do an extraction and get your THC out or CBD or whichever one that you're interested in. And that's the process that we're aiming for. And there's a few different advantages to this, but as far as the impact that this is going to have on the industry is that we're finally going to be able to have a reliable supply chain for CBD that's coming from a source that is industrially scalable. And what I mean by that is, now my thoughts are like a little bit over the place, but we'll bring it back. I'll keep going and then I'll bring it back. And then you guys can ask questions and then everything will be okay. So yeah, it is quite hard to grow cannabis plants. And I haven't tried growing them myself and I mean maybe it is kind of easy to do it in your closet with the right amount of investment. But once you start scaling things into like agricultural level and you're starting to build out acres of greenhouses that get entirely contaminated with powdery mildew and then you lose like millions of dollars of crops at the same time instead of like a few leaves in your plant in your closet, then you're getting into problems. So there was a few cases in Canada where some of these big marijuana companies that were growing these huge amounts of product were using pesticides that they weren't allowed to use because there's only a few pesticides that you're allowed to use because that's the way that Health Canada restricts things. And for good reason because you're lighting this product on fire, you're inhaling it and if you're inhaling pesticides, then that's different from when you're eating pesticides and so there's a really restrictive thing there. And so there's a few companies that got caught using these pesticides and that was causing some health problems in Canada. And I think this is still in the US. I'm not sure where things are at as far as pesticides use exactly, but I'm glad that Canada was discovered and this was enforced and that might not necessarily be true for all the different US states. And now with California's legalization coming up, there's expected to be some kind of bottleneck in cannabis testing labs where there just aren't enough labs to test all the cannabis that's going to go on to the market. So high-resports and no, if your cannabis does or does not have these pesticides in it. But all of these problems are associated with growing cannabis plants and not with yeast, of course, because when you grow yeast, it's just in these very controlled environments and you're focusing just on extracting your THC and not having, you don't have to add any pesticides or antibiotics or anything like that. The other key advantage is in diversity of products. So like was mentioned earlier, I see these things kind of like Lego blocks where there's going to be 100 different cannabis, there's going to be a whole bunch of terpenes and there are all these different molecular compositions that you could build and put together to create these optimal experiences for when you use a cannabinoid or cannabis product. And to kind of dismiss the idea of getting down to that finer-grain stuff and discovering what all these things do is like we have to know these things. And it's super interesting to know which perfect combination will be the best treatment for epilepsy or which perfect combination will be the best treatment for like a Friday night night out or something like that. And this is also part of the reason why yeast is so interesting is because you can manipulate the genetics, you can clone new things, you can build new cannabinoids or very quickly scale up new kinds of products using this technology. And then as I mentioned earlier, the question of scale is the other one. And this may be the biggest kind of clear thing that is becoming more and more defined as we go along with the development of the bigger and bigger grow-ups is if you think about the scale that is needed to treat something like epilepsy, like there's 50 million people in the world who have epilepsy and now there's like between CBD and CBDV some new drugs being developed for treating epilepsy. And if you add that up to how much the dosage is and what this is going to take, then you're getting into the range of like 1500 tons of pure CBD or CBDV, like the pure cannabinoid product. And I think if you compare that against like a cannabis growth operation and maybe the total amount of cannabis in the world right now, it's still maybe 100 or 1000 times away from getting close to that kind of numbers. And if you're willing to bet some money on like what's going to be the scalable best way to grow cannabis, it's going to cost you maybe $100 million to get to 16 tons per year of product. And if you pay more like $50 million of investment, then you might build a facility that grows yeast and you can do more like 750 tons per year. And so this is the reason why this is so interesting because it has this established industrial scalable model of manufacturing. And this is my last slide and then I'm excited to go to questions. I'm from Canada so you can ask me about the Canadian law system and what's going on there because I know quite a bit about that. But it's actually funny just to share a bit of perspective where Canada has this like, you know, very well-defined objective of like cannabis being illegal is a health risk because it exists as a black market and so on and so forth and there's access to youth that they really want to control. And so they're motivated in this way to create legalization and to create a framework for getting access to cannabis legally. And so, you know, instead of us dealing with the DEA, like the Drug Enforcement Agency or the FBI or whoever else that manages it where it's kind of a narcotics control board that's managed by the police, we deal with Health Canada where it's like a public health agency that is oriented towards improving the health of Canadians and they see this as like the priority. So you're welcome to ask me more questions about that. And maybe you can write into your own governments about, you know, this perspective because I think it's kind of one of these ruling arguments for towards cannabis legalization. And something's on fire. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Near the speakers for further instruction. Yes, carbon footprints. Yeah, yeah. I guess we'll sit tight or we can get up and go outside or something like that. I don't know what we're supposed to do. Is this going to be just going to be like a minute? Longer? Okay. We can talk while she's talking between alarms. We'll do it very quickly. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Near the speakers for further instruction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Oh, hey, we're back. All right. Hey. All right. Questions then. Yes. I'm back. You said you engineered the yeast to make TSC. How did you go about doing that? So, like I said earlier, the basic concept is to look at the genes in cannabis and take those. And I can speak more specifically, I guess. The cannabis genome is sequenced. It's online somewhere along with the genomes of various other organisms along with the yeast, of course. And so you can look at the genomes and pull the segments of DNA out, email those to a DNA census company, and they'll make it for you and send it to you in the mail. And so, you know, we've never actually touched any kind of plant material. We just used the digital DNA information and then just have it ordered online for us. And that's probably the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of stuff. And then there's like five or six different techniques, including the CRISPR-Cas9 stuff that you can use to engineer yeast. It really depends on, you know, what your approach is and what gene you're targeting. So, it's a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and tears and blood and everything that goes into engineering the yeast. But it'll take more time than it would take to, you know, grow a plant. And if you wanted to breed a plant that would have high amounts of THCV or something like that, then you're probably better off using a yeast than an engineering that instead of trying to breed a plant to do that kind of thing. Yes. Okay, you just said something that might be a little bit separate from the overall topic. Yes. You receive sequences, or you find sequences of DNA online and then you send them to a lab and then you receive plant material in return. No plant material. What is it that you are receiving? Because there are a lot of people who are very concerned about people using online genetic material about cannabis to breed a plant. And it's like, it's like a whole thing. And so, as somebody who's invested in the level of biochemical engineering, what do you know about that? Let's see. If I go to... Oh, I'm not online. You're mine. Alright, we won't do a live demo. But anyways, you can go to idtdna.com or look up just DNA synthesis companies and you can write in DNA sequences and they'll make them for you and it'll cost like ten cents per letter that you order. And then they send you the actual DNA sequence which will look like a clear powder or like a liquid or whatever and then that's what you work with. And that's, you know, the DNA is inside that liquid and that's all you're handling. So there's no actual plant material being moved around or anything like that. That's kind of how it goes. How far away are you from being able to say, for example, as he went, DNA for say, a cannabis, you know, an example of cannabis and then use that to create plant material directly from it? So if you were starting with synthesized DNA, then you would need to have also like a plant material to add it into. So you're not like growing from scratch, of course. And this is where like what Mark was saying earlier about how you need to have isolated versions of plant cells that can be grown into plants and then you can cultivate, you know, modified strains like all this technology that's involved. That's part of what you would need to take synthesized DNA and make modified plants. So you wouldn't be able to order a plant online by just typing the DNA sequence of the plant. Not yet, one day. Maybe in ten years, maybe like a hundred years. I don't know. I don't know. I think I saw any in the back first. Was there any research to the effectiveness of plants that are in the plants versus in the year? Not specifically. And that is one of the things that we will be testing like as soon as we make the stuff and are authorized to do all the testing and whatever else needs to happen for that. But basically when we're looking at and we're thinking about this, we're talking about the chemical composition and what's going to work the best. And so when, if you took THC that's been isolated into 100% pure from the plant, 100% pure from chemical synthesis and maybe 100% pure from biosynthesis and compared to the side by side, you should have exactly the same results no matter what. And then the, usually the finer detail of like how effective a cannabis thing is versus aesthetic thing is is when you're talking about these compositions of cannabis oils where yeah, there's more stuff in cannabis oil and so you get different effects compared to just like a purified form of THC. And that will be something that we consider when we go into our own testing is like we're not just wanting to make purified THC because that's kind of been done and doesn't work that well compared to cannabis in many cases. I saw this in, yeah, over there in the back. Yeah. Okay. About 12 months kind of thing. Yeah, 12 to 18 months and right behind you. So asking for a friend, where does one purchase this piece? It's not for sale yet and maybe on our website eventually. The highestandthbio.com. You can go there and try it. Yeah. Sorry, highestandthbio.com. That's our website. I have business cards and stickers and stuff. You guys can come up to the front and grab some too. Who did I have next? Is it you next, I think? You still have your hand up so let's go with you. Can you use this yeast theoretically in baking? Theoretically, yes. And practically probably yes as well. And this has been done or explored a bit with the people who are trying to engineer yeast to make opioid stuff. Like they took it and tried to brew a beer with it. And then I think their analysis was like, look, it doesn't make opioids, which is like, you know, it wouldn't because the conditions are different because there's not very much yeast in there. So you might be able to bake a bread with it. It might not have any TSC in it and that's just like the way it will go. And it might smell like flowers or something like that. Tensely and very intensely caused a long-term endentic development. There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience. All right. Thanks. In the back. Have you looked at using it to... Tensely and intensely caused a long-term endentic development. There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience. All right. Yes. And there are some terpenes that could possibly be good biosynthesis targets along with the kinaminoids. But also some of these terpenes I think you can get from other sources kind of cheaply. Or even take a purified form of CBD that we make and mix that in with like a hemp oil and then you have your full spectrum thing that way. There are a few different ideas that we have gotten in mind for when we get to that stage. Yeah. So your main focus right now is CBD. And that is mostly to get this to market and then eventually switch over to two different shrinks or three or more. Yeah. It is a bunch of things in parallel kind of thing. So CBD we have done maybe the most to work around. But also like this kind of science does well when you try to do THC as well at the same time or THCV. And so we've got like a whole bunch of tracks that are running through in like high throughput kind of thing. Yeah. All right. I see somebody way in the back. What is your volume reduction from the soup to the purified compound? So when you're looking at like the yeast soup in like a liter of yeast soup you would get like one gram of product kind of thing. And that's like our that's our next target. We're not there yet. But like, you know, that's sort of what we're aiming for. And that's pretty good for a process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Insulin is a different, yeah, it's hard to compare, I guess, because every product is a bit different and insulin is like a protein. So you need less of it. And also it's producing much lower amounts. But I guess the comparison that I can draw is when people were trying to do biofuels using yeast where, you know, then they were getting like pretty a lot higher yields or they needed to get a lot higher yields in order to make it commercializable. And then you're talking about like, you know, tens or hundreds of grams of product per liter of yeast or even more than that maybe. So yeah. So that's our kind of our goal. Yes. Are you actually extracting it? So, solvent extraction, basically, and there's a bunch of other techniques like we could try supercritical CO2 stuff as well and do the same thing as we done with plants. And I'm going, I don't know if I'm going over time, but I guess Rex, are you up next? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Rex will tell me when he's ready to present. Okay. Cool. So this will be maybe one more question after this while Rex gets set up. And your question was extraction. Yeah. So there's various methods and there's, there's ones that are established pretty well for yeast, like doing like column separation or, or solvent extraction stuff. It depends a bit on the product and depends if we're going for THC or if we're going for CBD and depends on like other things. And yeah. Yeah. Okay. Rex. Yes. All right. Cool. I'm excited for Rex's talk too. So stick around. Thank you.
 Alright, I think I'll get started and tell you guys a bit about my work with engineering  strains of yeast to produce various cannaminoids.  My name is Kevin, I'm from Montreal, this is my first DEF CON and I'm enjoying it a  lot.  My background is primarily in biochemistry, but I am the CEO of Hyazinth and I do a lot  of the fundraising stuff.  And on the side I also do some biohacking and DIY bio sort of stuff, so I've been to  hope another, I guess I've been to hope a couple of times and so I'm somewhat familiar  with hacking things, but I'm not very good at any hacking stuff so hopefully today and  tomorrow I'll learn something from you guys.  A little closer to my, yes.  So to get things started, I guess, I don't know if you guys were here for the rest of  the day and saw the other talks, but maybe you got a bit of a primer about cannabis  and how it grows and how to tell if it's sick or not or what the chemistry looks like.  We had some fantastic talks earlier about that.  I'm going to shift the focus away from maybe cannabis plant stuff and talk more about specifically  the cannaminoids, which are the name for the active ingredients in cannabis.  So like THC is one cannaminoid, CBD is another cannaminoid and there's about 100 others.  And the basic question to start things off is like, where do they come from and also  how much do they cost?  Of course, most intuitive thing is to grow plants and to get THC and that's pretty good.  And as far as costs go for growing plants, you guys, people who have done their own growing  would know their own estimates, but I think if you had pure THC, maybe like $10 a gram  kind of thing if you really want to like, you know, get your costs down.  But anyways, plants are just one way of getting THC and as we saw earlier, you can also synthesize  THC using chemistry and that's kind of what you would see in the middle image there is  like a big chemical plant that's producing all this THC.  I think that plant in particular is for some other pharmaceutical or antibiotic or something  like that.  But I'm here to talk about a third way of doing this stuff, which is to engineer strains  of yeast to produce THC and other cannaminoids, which has its own set of advantages compared  to chemistry and compared to growing plants.  So it's a bit of an introduction to what this is all about.  We're talking about biosynthesis here, which means that there are chemical reactions happening  inside the plant cells that will take, you know, sugar all the way to something called  olivotolic acid then to cannabidiolic acid and eventually to THC or tetrahedral cannaminoleic  acid and CBD.  And these chemical reactions are driven by enzymes, which are the molecular machinery  of the cell and I don't know what kind of backgrounds people have in like biochemistry  and stuff like that.  But these enzymes are genes inside cannabis that you can cut and paste and move around  if you wanted to.  And so our goal is to kind of take these genes from cannabis, like those segments of DNA that  are responsible for producing THC and put those into a strain of yeast.  And then that yeast we can grow using just sugar and water and really big steel tanks  that go up to hundreds of thousands of liters and have a really big like industrial scale  kind of system for producing pure THC.  That's a lot more efficient than chemistry and growing plants.  What this looks like from I guess overview standpoint is that, you know, you're, when  you're thinking about what a yeast is doing in its cells, it takes in sugar and it grows.  That's what a yeast does and produces CO2.  And or it produces ethanol if you want to make a beer or something like that.  And our job as a metabolic engineers and genetic engineers is to look at this pathway and add  on things that are going to get us to making something like a livetolic acid and eventually  to THC.  So this involves a lot of like changing around the genome of yeast and tweaking certain things  and figuring out different ways to grow it so that it does optimize for production of  THC.  And in the simplest, you know, way of thinking about this, you know, we add three or four  enzymes, you know, they convert from sugar to THC in the end and that's, you know, the  easy like, you know, way to think about the problem.  But and then if you want to make something like CBD, then you remove the THC producing  enzyme and you add a CBD producing enzyme and then you're making CBD and CBD and THC.  And this is one of the advantages of, you know, manipulating genetics that you can switch  things on, switch things off, you control the stuff like a program.  The challenge comes in as things get more complicated when you're talking about like  a hundred different cannabinoids and all these other metabolites that get made alongside  of it where it's not, you know, as easy as adding just three or four genes to a yeast  and then you get THC out, you're going to be playing around with maybe hundreds of different  genes and for us, you know, we've gone through hundreds, it's not thousands of combinations  of different genes to optimize and to improve always on our yields and to try and get to  different, producing different cannabinoids.  And yeah, so that's kind of, you know, how we think about this stuff.  And just to clarify one thing, I guess, we saw a bit of this earlier too.  We're not thinking about synthetic cannabinoids at all.  Like we're just interested in the ones that the plants make.  You could possibly engineer yeasts to produce some of these synthetic cannabinoids, but there's  not as much of like an interest in these things right now.  So I don't usually use the word synthetic when I talk about what we do because people  get sometimes confused about synthetic cannabinoids versus ones from plants and we're making the  ones from plants but we're not growing plants in anyways.  Yeah.  All right.  So after we've made cannabinoids and the question is, okay, where do we go?  And this comes to, you know, talking about why we're doing this whole thing.  As we would have seen earlier as well and probably because, no, like cannabinoids go  into your brain, they react with your cannabinoid receptors and then you get, you know, the  various effects like, you know, feeling high or having an appetite or whatever else and  all kinds of different things or as Mark Lewis said this morning, maybe, you know, tweaking  your entire personality apparently is part of this system.  But it's, yeah, super interesting system to manipulate and there's all these different  cannabinoids that are going to affect it and that's ultimately, you know, what we're working  towards.  And because cannabinoids do this, that means that we can use them to treat various diseases,  whether that's for epilepsy or for mental health disorders like depression or anxiety,  even glioblastoma has like, you know, late stage brain cancers has seen a lot of interesting  results from using THC along with other cancer treatments.  And then nausea, appetite loss during cancer therapy is another, that one is what, Marinal  Holt that exists on the market right now is prescribed for and there's also another product  called Satevex, that's cannabis extract, that's also a prescription drug.  So a lot of newer cannabinoid stuff kind of points in that direction.  So I guess out of these two, out of these four pictures, maybe the biggest ones are epilepsy,  which is fairly new and then nausea, appetite and stuff is kind of the classical, you know,  thing that people try to use cannabinoids for.  And there's the famous story of Charlotte's Web and this whole thing where CBD is now  like being used for treating epilepsy and there's a really interesting timeline where  this stuff kind of came out in 2013 and then 2014, like the pharmaceutical company GW  Pharmaceuticals started their first trials of CBD with epilepsy and now it's as of a  few months ago on its way to the market and approved by the FDA.  And yeah, so when it comes to thinking about like why we're doing this, we're really interested  in looking at different ways of producing THC and CBD and not just thinking exclusively  about growing plants as like this has to be the all-end-all solution because it does take  a lot of energy and time to grow plants.  And if I think in terms of numbers, it's like, yeah, three months to grow plants and if you  really want to get high levels of THC, then you have to grow indoors in a very controlled  environment and have those like lighting energy and stuff like that.  So it's really not that environmentally friendly or economical to grow THC in that method.  And then with chemistry, you're working with petroleum-based compounds, you're having multiple  different reactors and always interesting temperature controls and reagents have to  go into that process and that also becomes quite complicated and can take weeks as well  to do.  But with yeast, it's more like you add sugar, you add water, you add the yeast, you wait  a week, these grows up, then you do an extraction and get your THC out or CBD or whichever one  that you're interested in.  And that's the process that we're aiming for.  And there's a few different advantages to this, but as far as the impact that this is  going to have on the industry is that we're finally going to be able to have a reliable  supply chain for CBD that's coming from a source that is industrially scalable.  And what I mean by that is, now my thoughts are like a little bit over the place, but  we'll bring it back.  I'll keep going and then I'll bring it back.  And then you guys can ask questions and then everything will be okay.  So yeah, it is quite hard to grow cannabis plants.  And I haven't tried growing them myself and I mean maybe it is kind of easy to do it in  your closet with the right amount of investment.  But once you start scaling things into like agricultural level and you're starting to  build out acres of greenhouses that get entirely contaminated with powdery mildew and then  you lose like millions of dollars of crops at the same time instead of like a few leaves  in your plant in your closet, then you're getting into problems.  So there was a few cases in Canada where some of these big marijuana companies that were  growing these huge amounts of product were using pesticides that they weren't allowed  to use because there's only a few pesticides that you're allowed to use because that's  the way that Health Canada restricts things.  And for good reason because you're lighting this product on fire, you're inhaling it and  if you're inhaling pesticides, then that's different from when you're eating pesticides  and so there's a really restrictive thing there.  And so there's a few companies that got caught using these pesticides and that was causing  some health problems in Canada.  And I think this is still in the US.  I'm not sure where things are at as far as pesticides use exactly, but I'm glad that  Canada was discovered and this was enforced and that might not necessarily be true for  all the different US states.  And now with California's legalization coming up, there's expected to be some kind of bottleneck  in cannabis testing labs where there just aren't enough labs to test all the cannabis  that's going to go on to the market.  So high-resports and no, if your cannabis does or does not have these pesticides in  it.  But all of these problems are associated with growing cannabis plants and not with yeast,  of course, because when you grow yeast, it's just in these very controlled environments  and you're focusing just on extracting your THC and not having, you don't have to add  any pesticides or antibiotics or anything like that.  The other key advantage is in diversity of products.  So like was mentioned earlier, I see these things kind of like Lego blocks where there's  going to be 100 different cannabis, there's going to be a whole bunch of terpenes and  there are all these different molecular compositions that you could build and put together to create  these optimal experiences for when you use a cannabinoid or cannabis product.  And to kind of dismiss the idea of getting down to that finer-grain stuff and discovering  what all these things do is like we have to know these things.  And it's super interesting to know which perfect combination will be the best treatment for  epilepsy or which perfect combination will be the best treatment for like a Friday night  night out or something like that.  And this is also part of the reason why yeast is so interesting is because you can manipulate  the genetics, you can clone new things, you can build new cannabinoids or very quickly  scale up new kinds of products using this technology.  And then as I mentioned earlier, the question of scale is the other one.  And this may be the biggest kind of clear thing that is becoming more and more defined  as we go along with the development of the bigger and bigger grow-ups is if you think  about the scale that is needed to treat something like epilepsy, like there's 50 million people  in the world who have epilepsy and now there's like between CBD and CBDV some new drugs being  developed for treating epilepsy.  And if you add that up to how much the dosage is and what this is going to take, then you're  getting into the range of like 1500 tons of pure CBD or CBDV, like the pure cannabinoid  product.  And I think if you compare that against like a cannabis growth operation and maybe the  total amount of cannabis in the world right now, it's still maybe 100 or 1000 times away  from getting close to that kind of numbers.  And if you're willing to bet some money on like what's going to be the scalable best  way to grow cannabis, it's going to cost you maybe $100 million to get to 16 tons per  year of product.  And if you pay more like $50 million of investment, then you might build a facility that grows  yeast and you can do more like 750 tons per year.  And so this is the reason why this is so interesting because it has this established  industrial scalable model of manufacturing.  And this is my last slide and then I'm excited to go to questions.  I'm from Canada so you can ask me about the Canadian law system and what's going on there  because I know quite a bit about that.  But it's actually funny just to share a bit of perspective where Canada has this like,  you know, very well-defined objective of like cannabis being illegal is a health risk because  it exists as a black market and so on and so forth and there's access to youth that  they really want to control.  And so they're motivated in this way to create legalization and to create a framework for  getting access to cannabis legally.  And so, you know, instead of us dealing with the DEA, like the Drug Enforcement Agency or  the FBI or whoever else that manages it where it's kind of a narcotics control board that's  managed by the police, we deal with Health Canada where it's like a public health agency  that is oriented towards improving the health of Canadians and they see this as like the  priority.  So you're welcome to ask me more questions about that.  And maybe you can write into your own governments about, you know, this perspective because  I think it's kind of one of these ruling arguments for towards cannabis legalization.  And something's on fire.  All right.  Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.  And a lot of housing has been activated.  We are investigating the cause.  Please remain calm and stand by.  Near the speakers for further instruction.  Yes, carbon footprints.  Yeah, yeah.  I guess we'll sit tight or we can get up and go outside or something like that.  I don't know what we're supposed to do.  Is this going to be just going to be like a minute?  Longer?  Okay.  We can talk while she's talking between alarms.  We'll do it very quickly.  Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.  And a lot of housing has been activated.  We are investigating the cause.  Please remain calm and stand by.  Near the speakers for further instruction.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please.  And a lot of housing has been activated.  We are investigating the cause.  Please remain calm and stand by.  Oh, hey, we're back.  All right.  Hey.  All right.  Questions then.  Yes.  I'm back.  You said you engineered the yeast to make TSC.  How did you go about doing that?  So, like I said earlier, the basic concept is to look at the genes in cannabis and take those.  And I can speak more specifically, I guess.  The cannabis genome is sequenced.  It's online somewhere along with the genomes of various other organisms along with the yeast, of course.  And so you can look at the genomes and pull the segments of DNA out, email those to a DNA census company, and they'll make it for you and send it to you in the mail.  And so, you know, we've never actually touched any kind of plant material.  We just used the digital DNA information and then just have it ordered online for us.  And that's probably the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of stuff.  And then there's like five or six different techniques, including the CRISPR-Cas9 stuff that you can use to engineer yeast.  It really depends on, you know, what your approach is and what gene you're targeting.  So, it's a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and tears and blood and everything that goes into engineering the yeast.  But it'll take more time than it would take to, you know, grow a plant.  And if you wanted to breed a plant that would have high amounts of THCV or something like that, then you're probably better off using a yeast than an engineering that instead of trying to breed a plant to do that kind of thing.  Yes.  Okay, you just said something that might be a little bit separate from the overall topic.  Yes.  You receive sequences, or you find sequences of DNA online and then you send them to a lab and then you receive plant material in return.  No plant material.  What is it that you are receiving?  Because there are a lot of people who are very concerned about people using online genetic material about cannabis to breed a plant.  And it's like, it's like a whole thing.  And so, as somebody who's invested in the level of biochemical engineering, what do you know about that?  Let's see.  If I go to...  Oh, I'm not online.  You're mine.  Alright, we won't do a live demo.  But anyways, you can go to idtdna.com or look up just DNA synthesis companies and you can write in DNA sequences and they'll make them for you and it'll cost like ten cents per letter that you order.  And then they send you the actual DNA sequence which will look like a clear powder or like a liquid or whatever and then that's what you work with.  And that's, you know, the DNA is inside that liquid and that's all you're handling.  So there's no actual plant material being moved around or anything like that.  That's kind of how it goes.  How far away are you from being able to say, for example, as he went, DNA for say, a cannabis, you know, an example of cannabis and then use that to create plant material directly from it?  So if you were starting with synthesized DNA, then you would need to have also like a plant material to add it into.  So you're not like growing from scratch, of course.  And this is where like what Mark was saying earlier about how you need to have isolated versions of plant cells that can be grown into plants and then you can cultivate, you know, modified strains like all this technology that's involved.  That's part of what you would need to take synthesized DNA and make modified plants.  So you wouldn't be able to order a plant online by just typing the DNA sequence of the plant.  Not yet, one day.  Maybe in ten years, maybe like a hundred years.  I don't know. I don't know.  I think I saw any in the back first.  Was there any research to the effectiveness of plants that are in the plants versus in the year?  Not specifically.  And that is one of the things that we will be testing like as soon as we make the stuff and are authorized to do all the testing and whatever else needs to happen for that.  But basically when we're looking at and we're thinking about this, we're talking about the chemical composition and what's going to work the best.  And so when, if you took THC that's been isolated into 100% pure from the plant, 100% pure from chemical synthesis and maybe 100% pure from biosynthesis and compared to the side by side, you should have exactly the same results no matter what.  And then the, usually the finer detail of like how effective a cannabis thing is versus aesthetic thing is is when you're talking about these compositions of cannabis oils where yeah, there's more stuff in cannabis oil and so you get different effects compared to just like a purified form of THC.  And that will be something that we consider when we go into our own testing is like we're not just wanting to make purified THC because that's kind of been done and doesn't work that well compared to cannabis in many cases.  I saw this in, yeah, over there in the back. Yeah.  Okay.  About 12 months kind of thing. Yeah, 12 to 18 months and right behind you.  So asking for a friend, where does one purchase this piece?  It's not for sale yet and maybe on our website eventually.  The highestandthbio.com. You can go there and try it. Yeah.  Sorry, highestandthbio.com. That's our website.  I have business cards and stickers and stuff. You guys can come up to the front and grab some too.  Who did I have next? Is it you next, I think? You still have your hand up so let's go with you.  Can you use this yeast theoretically in baking?  Theoretically, yes. And practically probably yes as well.  And this has been done or explored a bit with the people who are trying to engineer yeast to make opioid stuff.  Like they took it and tried to brew a beer with it.  And then I think their analysis was like, look, it doesn't make opioids, which is like, you know, it wouldn't because the conditions are different because there's not very much yeast in there.  So you might be able to bake a bread with it. It might not have any TSC in it and that's just like the way it will go.  And it might smell like flowers or something like that.  Tensely and very intensely caused a long-term endentic development.  There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience.  All right. Thanks. In the back.  Have you looked at using it to...  Tensely and intensely caused a long-term endentic development.  There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience.  All right.  Yes. And there are some terpenes that could possibly be good biosynthesis targets along with the kinaminoids.  But also some of these terpenes I think you can get from other sources kind of cheaply.  Or even take a purified form of CBD that we make and mix that in with like a hemp oil and then you have your full spectrum thing that way.  There are a few different ideas that we have gotten in mind for when we get to that stage.  Yeah.  So your main focus right now is CBD.  And that is mostly to get this to market and then eventually switch over to two different shrinks or three or more.  Yeah. It is a bunch of things in parallel kind of thing.  So CBD we have done maybe the most to work around.  But also like this kind of science does well when you try to do THC as well at the same time or THCV.  And so we've got like a whole bunch of tracks that are running through in like high throughput kind of thing.  Yeah.  All right. I see somebody way in the back.  What is your volume reduction from the soup to the purified compound?  So when you're looking at like the yeast soup in like a liter of yeast soup you would get like one gram of product kind of thing.  And that's like our that's our next target.  We're not there yet.  But like, you know, that's sort of what we're aiming for.  And that's pretty good for a process.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. Insulin is a different, yeah, it's hard to compare, I guess, because every product is a bit different and insulin is like a protein.  So you need less of it.  And also it's producing much lower amounts.  But I guess the comparison that I can draw is when people were trying to do biofuels using yeast where, you know, then they were getting like pretty a lot higher yields or they needed to get a lot higher yields in order to make it commercializable.  And then you're talking about like, you know, tens or hundreds of grams of product per liter of yeast or even more than that maybe.  So yeah.  So that's our kind of our goal.  Yes.  Are you actually extracting it?  So, solvent extraction, basically, and there's a bunch of other techniques like we could try supercritical CO2 stuff as well and do the same thing as we done with plants.  And I'm going, I don't know if I'm going over time, but I guess Rex, are you up next?  Yeah.  Yeah. Okay. All right. Rex will tell me when he's ready to present.  Okay.  Cool.  So this will be maybe one more question after this while Rex gets set up.  And your question was extraction.  Yeah.  So there's various methods and there's, there's ones that are established pretty well for yeast, like doing like column separation or, or solvent extraction stuff.  It depends a bit on the product and depends if we're going for THC or if we're going for CBD and depends on like other things.  And yeah. Yeah.  Okay.  Rex.  Yes.  All right. Cool. I'm excited for Rex's talk too. So stick around.  Thank you.
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Alright, I think I'll get started and tell you guys a bit about my work with engineering strains of yeast to produce various cannaminoids. My name is Kevin, I'm from Montreal, this is my first DEF CON and I'm enjoying it a lot. My background is primarily in biochemistry, but I am the CEO of Hyazinth and I do a lot of the fundraising stuff. And on the side I also do some biohacking and DIY bio sort of stuff, so I've been to hope another, I guess I've been to hope a couple of times and so I'm somewhat familiar with hacking things, but I'm not very good at any hacking stuff so hopefully today and tomorrow I'll learn something from you guys. A little closer to my, yes. So to get things started, I guess, I don't know if you guys were here for the rest of the day and saw the other talks, but maybe you got a bit of a primer about cannabis and how it grows and how to tell if it's sick or not or what the chemistry looks like. We had some fantastic talks earlier about that. I'm going to shift the focus away from maybe cannabis plant stuff and talk more about specifically the cannaminoids, which are the name for the active ingredients in cannabis. So like THC is one cannaminoid, CBD is another cannaminoid and there's about 100 others. And the basic question to start things off is like, where do they come from and also how much do they cost? Of course, most intuitive thing is to grow plants and to get THC and that's pretty good. And as far as costs go for growing plants, you guys, people who have done their own growing would know their own estimates, but I think if you had pure THC, maybe like $10 a gram kind of thing if you really want to like, you know, get your costs down. But anyways, plants are just one way of getting THC and as we saw earlier, you can also synthesize THC using chemistry and that's kind of what you would see in the middle image there is like a big chemical plant that's producing all this THC. I think that plant in particular is for some other pharmaceutical or antibiotic or something like that. But I'm here to talk about a third way of doing this stuff, which is to engineer strains of yeast to produce THC and other cannaminoids, which has its own set of advantages compared to chemistry and compared to growing plants. So it's a bit of an introduction to what this is all about. We're talking about biosynthesis here, which means that there are chemical reactions happening inside the plant cells that will take, you know, sugar all the way to something called olivotolic acid then to cannabidiolic acid and eventually to THC or tetrahedral cannaminoleic acid and CBD. And these chemical reactions are driven by enzymes, which are the molecular machinery of the cell and I don't know what kind of backgrounds people have in like biochemistry and stuff like that. But these enzymes are genes inside cannabis that you can cut and paste and move around if you wanted to. And so our goal is to kind of take these genes from cannabis, like those segments of DNA that are responsible for producing THC and put those into a strain of yeast. And then that yeast we can grow using just sugar and water and really big steel tanks that go up to hundreds of thousands of liters and have a really big like industrial scale kind of system for producing pure THC. That's a lot more efficient than chemistry and growing plants. What this looks like from I guess overview standpoint is that, you know, you're, when you're thinking about what a yeast is doing in its cells, it takes in sugar and it grows. That's what a yeast does and produces CO2. And or it produces ethanol if you want to make a beer or something like that. And our job as a metabolic engineers and genetic engineers is to look at this pathway and add on things that are going to get us to making something like a livetolic acid and eventually to THC. So this involves a lot of like changing around the genome of yeast and tweaking certain things and figuring out different ways to grow it so that it does optimize for production of THC. And in the simplest, you know, way of thinking about this, you know, we add three or four enzymes, you know, they convert from sugar to THC in the end and that's, you know, the easy like, you know, way to think about the problem. But and then if you want to make something like CBD, then you remove the THC producing enzyme and you add a CBD producing enzyme and then you're making CBD and CBD and THC. And this is one of the advantages of, you know, manipulating genetics that you can switch things on, switch things off, you control the stuff like a program. The challenge comes in as things get more complicated when you're talking about like a hundred different cannabinoids and all these other metabolites that get made alongside of it where it's not, you know, as easy as adding just three or four genes to a yeast and then you get THC out, you're going to be playing around with maybe hundreds of different genes and for us, you know, we've gone through hundreds, it's not thousands of combinations of different genes to optimize and to improve always on our yields and to try and get to different, producing different cannabinoids. And yeah, so that's kind of, you know, how we think about this stuff. And just to clarify one thing, I guess, we saw a bit of this earlier too. We're not thinking about synthetic cannabinoids at all. Like we're just interested in the ones that the plants make. You could possibly engineer yeasts to produce some of these synthetic cannabinoids, but there's not as much of like an interest in these things right now. So I don't usually use the word synthetic when I talk about what we do because people get sometimes confused about synthetic cannabinoids versus ones from plants and we're making the ones from plants but we're not growing plants in anyways. Yeah. All right. So after we've made cannabinoids and the question is, okay, where do we go? And this comes to, you know, talking about why we're doing this whole thing. As we would have seen earlier as well and probably because, no, like cannabinoids go into your brain, they react with your cannabinoid receptors and then you get, you know, the various effects like, you know, feeling high or having an appetite or whatever else and all kinds of different things or as Mark Lewis said this morning, maybe, you know, tweaking your entire personality apparently is part of this system. But it's, yeah, super interesting system to manipulate and there's all these different cannabinoids that are going to affect it and that's ultimately, you know, what we're working towards. And because cannabinoids do this, that means that we can use them to treat various diseases, whether that's for epilepsy or for mental health disorders like depression or anxiety, even glioblastoma has like, you know, late stage brain cancers has seen a lot of interesting results from using THC along with other cancer treatments. And then nausea, appetite loss during cancer therapy is another, that one is what, Marinal Holt that exists on the market right now is prescribed for and there's also another product called Satevex, that's cannabis extract, that's also a prescription drug. So a lot of newer cannabinoid stuff kind of points in that direction. So I guess out of these two, out of these four pictures, maybe the biggest ones are epilepsy, which is fairly new and then nausea, appetite and stuff is kind of the classical, you know, thing that people try to use cannabinoids for. And there's the famous story of Charlotte's Web and this whole thing where CBD is now like being used for treating epilepsy and there's a really interesting timeline where this stuff kind of came out in 2013 and then 2014, like the pharmaceutical company GW Pharmaceuticals started their first trials of CBD with epilepsy and now it's as of a few months ago on its way to the market and approved by the FDA. And yeah, so when it comes to thinking about like why we're doing this, we're really interested in looking at different ways of producing THC and CBD and not just thinking exclusively about growing plants as like this has to be the all-end-all solution because it does take a lot of energy and time to grow plants. And if I think in terms of numbers, it's like, yeah, three months to grow plants and if you really want to get high levels of THC, then you have to grow indoors in a very controlled environment and have those like lighting energy and stuff like that. So it's really not that environmentally friendly or economical to grow THC in that method. And then with chemistry, you're working with petroleum-based compounds, you're having multiple different reactors and always interesting temperature controls and reagents have to go into that process and that also becomes quite complicated and can take weeks as well to do. But with yeast, it's more like you add sugar, you add water, you add the yeast, you wait a week, these grows up, then you do an extraction and get your THC out or CBD or whichever one that you're interested in. And that's the process that we're aiming for. And there's a few different advantages to this, but as far as the impact that this is going to have on the industry is that we're finally going to be able to have a reliable supply chain for CBD that's coming from a source that is industrially scalable. And what I mean by that is, now my thoughts are like a little bit over the place, but we'll bring it back. I'll keep going and then I'll bring it back. And then you guys can ask questions and then everything will be okay. So yeah, it is quite hard to grow cannabis plants. And I haven't tried growing them myself and I mean maybe it is kind of easy to do it in your closet with the right amount of investment. But once you start scaling things into like agricultural level and you're starting to build out acres of greenhouses that get entirely contaminated with powdery mildew and then you lose like millions of dollars of crops at the same time instead of like a few leaves in your plant in your closet, then you're getting into problems. So there was a few cases in Canada where some of these big marijuana companies that were growing these huge amounts of product were using pesticides that they weren't allowed to use because there's only a few pesticides that you're allowed to use because that's the way that Health Canada restricts things. And for good reason because you're lighting this product on fire, you're inhaling it and if you're inhaling pesticides, then that's different from when you're eating pesticides and so there's a really restrictive thing there. And so there's a few companies that got caught using these pesticides and that was causing some health problems in Canada. And I think this is still in the US. I'm not sure where things are at as far as pesticides use exactly, but I'm glad that Canada was discovered and this was enforced and that might not necessarily be true for all the different US states. And now with California's legalization coming up, there's expected to be some kind of bottleneck in cannabis testing labs where there just aren't enough labs to test all the cannabis that's going to go on to the market. So high-resports and no, if your cannabis does or does not have these pesticides in it. But all of these problems are associated with growing cannabis plants and not with yeast, of course, because when you grow yeast, it's just in these very controlled environments and you're focusing just on extracting your THC and not having, you don't have to add any pesticides or antibiotics or anything like that. The other key advantage is in diversity of products. So like was mentioned earlier, I see these things kind of like Lego blocks where there's going to be 100 different cannabis, there's going to be a whole bunch of terpenes and there are all these different molecular compositions that you could build and put together to create these optimal experiences for when you use a cannabinoid or cannabis product. And to kind of dismiss the idea of getting down to that finer-grain stuff and discovering what all these things do is like we have to know these things. And it's super interesting to know which perfect combination will be the best treatment for epilepsy or which perfect combination will be the best treatment for like a Friday night night out or something like that. And this is also part of the reason why yeast is so interesting is because you can manipulate the genetics, you can clone new things, you can build new cannabinoids or very quickly scale up new kinds of products using this technology. And then as I mentioned earlier, the question of scale is the other one. And this may be the biggest kind of clear thing that is becoming more and more defined as we go along with the development of the bigger and bigger grow-ups is if you think about the scale that is needed to treat something like epilepsy, like there's 50 million people in the world who have epilepsy and now there's like between CBD and CBDV some new drugs being developed for treating epilepsy. And if you add that up to how much the dosage is and what this is going to take, then you're getting into the range of like 1500 tons of pure CBD or CBDV, like the pure cannabinoid product. And I think if you compare that against like a cannabis growth operation and maybe the total amount of cannabis in the world right now, it's still maybe 100 or 1000 times away from getting close to that kind of numbers. And if you're willing to bet some money on like what's going to be the scalable best way to grow cannabis, it's going to cost you maybe $100 million to get to 16 tons per year of product. And if you pay more like $50 million of investment, then you might build a facility that grows yeast and you can do more like 750 tons per year. And so this is the reason why this is so interesting because it has this established industrial scalable model of manufacturing. And this is my last slide and then I'm excited to go to questions. I'm from Canada so you can ask me about the Canadian law system and what's going on there because I know quite a bit about that. But it's actually funny just to share a bit of perspective where Canada has this like, you know, very well-defined objective of like cannabis being illegal is a health risk because it exists as a black market and so on and so forth and there's access to youth that they really want to control. And so they're motivated in this way to create legalization and to create a framework for getting access to cannabis legally. And so, you know, instead of us dealing with the DEA, like the Drug Enforcement Agency or the FBI or whoever else that manages it where it's kind of a narcotics control board that's managed by the police, we deal with Health Canada where it's like a public health agency that is oriented towards improving the health of Canadians and they see this as like the priority. So you're welcome to ask me more questions about that. And maybe you can write into your own governments about, you know, this perspective because I think it's kind of one of these ruling arguments for towards cannabis legalization. And something's on fire. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Near the speakers for further instruction. Yes, carbon footprints. Yeah, yeah. I guess we'll sit tight or we can get up and go outside or something like that. I don't know what we're supposed to do. Is this going to be just going to be like a minute? Longer? Okay. We can talk while she's talking between alarms. We'll do it very quickly. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Near the speakers for further instruction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. And a lot of housing has been activated. We are investigating the cause. Please remain calm and stand by. Oh, hey, we're back. All right. Hey. All right. Questions then. Yes. I'm back. You said you engineered the yeast to make TSC. How did you go about doing that? So, like I said earlier, the basic concept is to look at the genes in cannabis and take those. And I can speak more specifically, I guess. The cannabis genome is sequenced. It's online somewhere along with the genomes of various other organisms along with the yeast, of course. And so you can look at the genomes and pull the segments of DNA out, email those to a DNA census company, and they'll make it for you and send it to you in the mail. And so, you know, we've never actually touched any kind of plant material. We just used the digital DNA information and then just have it ordered online for us. And that's probably the fastest and easiest way to do this kind of stuff. And then there's like five or six different techniques, including the CRISPR-Cas9 stuff that you can use to engineer yeast. It really depends on, you know, what your approach is and what gene you're targeting. So, it's a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and tears and blood and everything that goes into engineering the yeast. But it'll take more time than it would take to, you know, grow a plant. And if you wanted to breed a plant that would have high amounts of THCV or something like that, then you're probably better off using a yeast than an engineering that instead of trying to breed a plant to do that kind of thing. Yes. Okay, you just said something that might be a little bit separate from the overall topic. Yes. You receive sequences, or you find sequences of DNA online and then you send them to a lab and then you receive plant material in return. No plant material. What is it that you are receiving? Because there are a lot of people who are very concerned about people using online genetic material about cannabis to breed a plant. And it's like, it's like a whole thing. And so, as somebody who's invested in the level of biochemical engineering, what do you know about that? Let's see. If I go to... Oh, I'm not online. You're mine. Alright, we won't do a live demo. But anyways, you can go to idtdna.com or look up just DNA synthesis companies and you can write in DNA sequences and they'll make them for you and it'll cost like ten cents per letter that you order. And then they send you the actual DNA sequence which will look like a clear powder or like a liquid or whatever and then that's what you work with. And that's, you know, the DNA is inside that liquid and that's all you're handling. So there's no actual plant material being moved around or anything like that. That's kind of how it goes. How far away are you from being able to say, for example, as he went, DNA for say, a cannabis, you know, an example of cannabis and then use that to create plant material directly from it? So if you were starting with synthesized DNA, then you would need to have also like a plant material to add it into. So you're not like growing from scratch, of course. And this is where like what Mark was saying earlier about how you need to have isolated versions of plant cells that can be grown into plants and then you can cultivate, you know, modified strains like all this technology that's involved. That's part of what you would need to take synthesized DNA and make modified plants. So you wouldn't be able to order a plant online by just typing the DNA sequence of the plant. Not yet, one day. Maybe in ten years, maybe like a hundred years. I don't know. I don't know. I think I saw any in the back first. Was there any research to the effectiveness of plants that are in the plants versus in the year? Not specifically. And that is one of the things that we will be testing like as soon as we make the stuff and are authorized to do all the testing and whatever else needs to happen for that. But basically when we're looking at and we're thinking about this, we're talking about the chemical composition and what's going to work the best. And so when, if you took THC that's been isolated into 100% pure from the plant, 100% pure from chemical synthesis and maybe 100% pure from biosynthesis and compared to the side by side, you should have exactly the same results no matter what. And then the, usually the finer detail of like how effective a cannabis thing is versus aesthetic thing is is when you're talking about these compositions of cannabis oils where yeah, there's more stuff in cannabis oil and so you get different effects compared to just like a purified form of THC. And that will be something that we consider when we go into our own testing is like we're not just wanting to make purified THC because that's kind of been done and doesn't work that well compared to cannabis in many cases. I saw this in, yeah, over there in the back. Yeah. Okay. About 12 months kind of thing. Yeah, 12 to 18 months and right behind you. So asking for a friend, where does one purchase this piece? It's not for sale yet and maybe on our website eventually. The highestandthbio.com. You can go there and try it. Yeah. Sorry, highestandthbio.com. That's our website. I have business cards and stickers and stuff. You guys can come up to the front and grab some too. Who did I have next? Is it you next, I think? You still have your hand up so let's go with you. Can you use this yeast theoretically in baking? Theoretically, yes. And practically probably yes as well. And this has been done or explored a bit with the people who are trying to engineer yeast to make opioid stuff. Like they took it and tried to brew a beer with it. And then I think their analysis was like, look, it doesn't make opioids, which is like, you know, it wouldn't because the conditions are different because there's not very much yeast in there. So you might be able to bake a bread with it. It might not have any TSC in it and that's just like the way it will go. And it might smell like flowers or something like that. Tensely and very intensely caused a long-term endentic development. There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience. All right. Thanks. In the back. Have you looked at using it to... Tensely and intensely caused a long-term endentic development. There is no way to see if we are sorry for any inconvenience. All right. Yes. And there are some terpenes that could possibly be good biosynthesis targets along with the kinaminoids. But also some of these terpenes I think you can get from other sources kind of cheaply. Or even take a purified form of CBD that we make and mix that in with like a hemp oil and then you have your full spectrum thing that way. There are a few different ideas that we have gotten in mind for when we get to that stage. Yeah. So your main focus right now is CBD. And that is mostly to get this to market and then eventually switch over to two different shrinks or three or more. Yeah. It is a bunch of things in parallel kind of thing. So CBD we have done maybe the most to work around. But also like this kind of science does well when you try to do THC as well at the same time or THCV. And so we've got like a whole bunch of tracks that are running through in like high throughput kind of thing. Yeah. All right. I see somebody way in the back. What is your volume reduction from the soup to the purified compound? So when you're looking at like the yeast soup in like a liter of yeast soup you would get like one gram of product kind of thing. And that's like our that's our next target. We're not there yet. But like, you know, that's sort of what we're aiming for. And that's pretty good for a process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Insulin is a different, yeah, it's hard to compare, I guess, because every product is a bit different and insulin is like a protein. So you need less of it. And also it's producing much lower amounts. But I guess the comparison that I can draw is when people were trying to do biofuels using yeast where, you know, then they were getting like pretty a lot higher yields or they needed to get a lot higher yields in order to make it commercializable. And then you're talking about like, you know, tens or hundreds of grams of product per liter of yeast or even more than that maybe. So yeah. So that's our kind of our goal. Yes. Are you actually extracting it? So, solvent extraction, basically, and there's a bunch of other techniques like we could try supercritical CO2 stuff as well and do the same thing as we done with plants. And I'm going, I don't know if I'm going over time, but I guess Rex, are you up next? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Rex will tell me when he's ready to present. Okay. Cool. So this will be maybe one more question after this while Rex gets set up. And your question was extraction. Yeah. So there's various methods and there's, there's ones that are established pretty well for yeast, like doing like column separation or, or solvent extraction stuff. It depends a bit on the product and depends if we're going for THC or if we're going for CBD and depends on like other things. And yeah. Yeah. Okay. Rex. Yes. All right. Cool. I'm excited for Rex's talk too. So stick around. Thank you.
guys a bit about my work with engineering strains is Kevin, I'm from Montreal, this is my first DEF And on the side I also do some biohacking and DIY from maybe cannabis plant stuff and talk more yeast to produce THC and other cannaminoids, around the genome of yeast and tweaking certain 2013 and then 2014, like the pharmaceutical quickly scale up new kinds of products using this like a cannabis growth operation and maybe the biosynthesis and compared to the side by side, work that well compared to cannabis in many much yeast in there. So you might be able to bake to make it commercializable. And then you're