LONDON, June 13th, 2019 – Winchester MD Limited has acquired a minority position in Boston, Massachusetts based private synthetic cannabis company Biotii Technologies Corp., created and managed by a group of highly qualified MIT and Harvard health care professionals.
Biotii is actively pursuing genetically engineered microorganisms that express cannabinoid profiles identical to those found in nature – at a fraction of the cost of current cannabis production methods. The scalable synthesizing process will enable the manufacture of lesser-known cannabis compounds, as well as well as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD), at materially lower costs when compared to conventional cultivation and extraction processes. [the_ad id=”31605″]Traditional cultivation of cannabis plants for the purpose of extracting cannabidiolic acid (CBDA), including medical THC and CBD is a time, labor and resource intensive endeavor that can result in depressed extraction yields of approximately 2.5%.
An alternative tool to produce cannabinoids is biosynthetic engineering, where single cell organisms are programmed to synthesize the enzymes for the metabolic pathway that generates cannabinoids from sugars. Biotii intends to leverage a unique system to mass manufacture large quantities of cannabinoids with a smaller environmental footprint than other known methods.
By 2020, the Biotii team intends to establish processes to mass-produce CBD and medical THC in large quantities (in excess of one hundred metric tons per annum) and boast stable, consistent yields with pharmaceutical grade purities, with the lowest production costs in the industry.
Biotii has in recent times significantly advanced its business plans to include the announced investment on 4th April 2019 from ICC International Cannabis Corp. (ICC) and the subsequent entry into a design and automation agreement with Y Combinator backed Opentrons Labworks Inc. alongside ICC.
The Companies will collaborate to architect and construct Canada’s first privately owned high-throughput Bioworks Foundry. The Bioworks Foundry will function as a staging ground for Biotii’s cannabinoid researchers and organism designers to manufacture and analyze prototype enzyme pathways. The state-of-the-art facility will afford International Cannabis and Biotii the ability to scale its synthesized cannabinoid testing processes in a rapid and cost effective fashion.
Dr Harrold, CEO, is an MIT instructor with expertise in end-to-end bio-lab management. He is also an entrepreneur having started four start-ups, including two funded by the National Science Foundation. Similarly, Biotii’s chief product officer Sisi Ni is an MIT trained materials scientist and engineer who was previously named as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30’s. Biotii has formed key relationships with leading medical research institutions in both the US and China.
“Biotii has a team of professionals from Harvard and MIT who are looking to disrupt the cannabis space by creating cannabinoids from glucose. This technology would significantly reduce the cost of input for our products which ultimately will bring increased shareholder value” said Faz Moshfeghi, CEO and Co-Founder of Winchester.